Browsing Archive: May, 2010
Posted by Chris Bird on Wednesday, May 26, 2010,
One year ago today my camera broke, and I had to replace it with a new one.
Today I realized that in that single year, I have taken 6,565 photos with my new camera, and another 3,235 photos with my dSLR camera. That is a total of 9,800 photos in a single year, as well as countless hours of HD video. I might have a problem :(
But then I remember back to when I got my first camera. When I could take 12 photos and then pay $20 to wait a week and discover that they hadn't turned out. Back when you ...
Continue reading ...
Posted by Chris Bird on Tuesday, May 25, 2010,
In :
Events
That's right, it is finally here again - International Geek Appreciation Day!
It is also known in some circles as Towel Day due to the influence of Douglas Adams, so everyone must carry their towel around for the day. In other groupings it is known as the 33rd anniversary of the opening of the first Star Wars movie.Personally, I will be celebrating tonight with my dearest robots, and maybe giving them gifts of new algorithms for their programming.
Happy IGAD everyone!
Continue reading ...
Posted by Chris Bird on Tuesday, May 18, 2010,
In :
News
The Fermilab today released some preliminary findings of a particle reaction that produces slightly more matter than antimatter, possible explaining why there is so much matter in the visible Universe but no antimatter.
In nature there are two types of massive particle, dubbed by scientists as matter and antimatter. When the two meet they destroy each other and convert their masses to pure energy. And in every experiment conducted thus far, they are produced and destroyed in exactly equal amou...
Continue reading ...
Posted by Chris Bird on Saturday, May 15, 2010,
In :
News
As some loyal readers may already know, about ten years ago I wrote a series of screen savers based on the chaos game method of fractal generation. These were quite popular (especially with the U.S. military for some strange unknown reason) and were downloaded thousands of times.
However I quit maintaining them due to an overwhelming amount of other work and responsibilities, and so they faded from use.
Well, in the last few months I managed to find a few spare minutes to re-write them using fo...
Continue reading ...
Posted by Chris Bird on Sunday, May 9, 2010,
As I predicted, the debate over dark matter detection has already heated up. (See my last post for the background details)
The three experiments with positive dark matter signals (DAMA, CDMS-II, and CoGent) are standing by their results, and at least two of these groups have raised serious concerns about the XENON experiment. And probably with good reason.The three prior experiments had long runs before publishing results, while XENON has run for approximately 11 days. They will run for longer... Continue reading ...
Posted by Chris Bird on Thursday, May 6, 2010,
In :
News
I read an interesting article today on new experimental data from the XENON dark matter search. But first I should give a little background...
For the last few decades there has been growing evidence that the majority of matter in the Universe is in some unknown exotic form. All we know about it is that it has a mass, and that it doesn't interact very much if at all with light. There are literally thousands of proposed models for dark matter, and it seems at times that there are just as many e...
Continue reading ...
I am a physicist recently graduated from the University of Victoria, with a doctorate in theoretical physics. I also have training in mathematics, engineering and computer programming.