Here’s a fun site. Did you ever play “telephone” as a child? Check out this clever website: Lost in Translation. It takes advantage of the successive use of good quality Internet language translators. It will convert an English passage into a different language and back to English, five times in succession. …
I was perusing a back issue of Physics Today, reading an article about events at the Large Hadron Collider, when I noticed the word, “femtobarn”. It was defined as 10-39 sq.cm. or a decimal followed by 38 zeros then a one. This is pretty small.
As a midwesterner, I thought I knew the size of a barn. So I multiplied out the femto (you know, milli-, micro-, nano-, pico-, femto-) to get the quadrillion times larger 10-24sq.cm. This is a barn? I had to Google this, and found a clear article at Stanford defining it for lay-folk.
In brief, physicists in the 1940’s were often discussing the cross-sectional area of the Uranium Nucleus. They thought of calling it the Oppenheimer (too many syllables) or the Bethe (too likely to be heard as Beta). Well, most of the research was being done in the midwest, and slamming protons into this target made them think of tossing tomatoes at a barn. The name “barn” was used in a reviewed article, accepted, and it stuck. Now, why femtobarns as the standard unit? It’s just practical for their purposes, like kilometers or megabytes.
By now, if you’ve read this far, you are probably wondering, “why should we care?” Sure, it’s fun to say “femtobarn”, but what use is it in everyday life?
Just yesterday, I saw on the news that Bush has a new strategy for Iraq: he'll be giving a series of (ridiculous) speeches aimed at justifying his invasion of Iraq. He still believes his poll numbers are in the tank because Americans have a perception problem. That's perhaps why he…
Post: The word by itself evokes for me a thick, square cedar pole standing up from, and presumably sunk down into the ground, waiting for the laundry line. Suppose you post a letter to the officer who posthumously posted your father to his army post in the post-war era. Words…
To optimize next-generation action-items, it is important to enable leading-edge models to enable one-to-one solutions thereby facilitating aggregate robust portals. Of course, to benchmark front-end paradigms and thereby embrace user-centric architectures is probably a better way to engineer leading-edge metrics.
If you’re wincing at the above paragraph, please forgive me. I’m just having a bit of fun, thanks to a site called “Web economy bullshit generator.” Whenever you press the “make bullshit” button, the site gives you an impressive sounding phrase. This site has many “uses.” For instance, see the comments to the site:
The Web Bullshit Generator is phenomenal…my resume never looked so good!
—Cory L.This is a great job interview prep tool and provides fodder to use on chicks at the bar. I’m also going to use this in preparation for my high school reunion.
—Ryan F.
No one could ever fall for such stilted, meaningless and concocted gibberish, right? Not so fast! Using big words and proper syntax goes a long way to making something appear meaningful. For example, the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, a leading journal of cultural studies contained an article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The author was Alan Sokal, a real life physicist at New York University. As indicated here, in an article by the Skeptical Inquirer’s Martin Gardner:
…[Sokal’s] paper included thirteen pages of impressive endnotes and nine pages of references.” But Sokal had actually submitted these 13 pages