Hunky Husband and I have spent this past week in meetings held by the organization for which we volunteer - some meetings of which were informational, some of which were training, some of which we were actually getting work/planning accomplished. At our ages, 10-12 hours of meetings is just too much. We skipped the evening meetings, entirely! As it was, we were at meetings from 8am to 6:30pm each day. There was no day that I failed to put in a few more hours at my normal type of volunteer work. Yesterday, I took it easy. (In my jargon, that means that I only put in about seven hours at a hot computer.)
Sexist quote of the day: “I couldn’t believe it,” recalls Peggy Udden, an executive secretary at MIT, “not only because she was so young, but a girl.” from a Yahoo! article concerning Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski. Pasterski is a physicist, a first-generation American from Cuba who is the new buzz in the world of physics. If you want to see Pasterski's home-built aircraft, go here.
Speaking of buzzes in physics: Gravitational waves, Einstein’s ripples in spacetime, spotted for first time. From the linked article:
The discovery marks a triumph for the 1000 physicists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a pair of gigantic instruments in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. Rumors of the detection had circulated for months. Today, at a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team made it official. “We did it!” says David Reitze, a physicist and LIGO executive director at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. “All the rumors swirling around out there got most of it right.”
From Wikipedia:
History of the Universe - gravitational waves are hypothesized to arise from cosmic inflation, a faster-than-light expansion just after the Big Bang (17 March 2014
By Yinweichen (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Earth-shaking: Yesterday, we experienced another earthquake - stronger than any I've previously felt in Kansas. The quake was measured as 5.1 on the Richter Scale by USGS with epicenter down in Oklahoma - the strongest quake they've had since 2011. It really rattled my computer and everything on my computer desk around! (I was working on the computer at the time.)
Those earthquakes are the precursor to the Yellowstone super-volcano erupting and causing a mass extinction. 😃😂
Posted by: Ingineer66 | February 15, 2016 at 10:59 AM
My husband was telling me he wondered about how we could detect gravity waves. I told him it was obvious. What did he think was holding him on the surface of the earth??
Anyway, ingineer, like many people, does not believe that there is any correlation between one thing and another thing, so you might as well make up your own facts.
Posted by: Hattie | February 16, 2016 at 01:13 AM
"What did he think was holding him on the surface of the earth??"
Van der Waals force stops him sinking below the surface of solids, surely?
Posted by: Ole Phat Stu | February 16, 2016 at 02:30 PM
Hattie, you take me too seriously. It was a joke.
Posted by: Ingineer66 | February 16, 2016 at 10:52 PM
Ingineer--You are wicked!
Hattie--Are you saying that your husband doesn't believe there is a correlation or that Ingineer doesn't? I'm confused!
Stu--Geckos love van der Waals. (You are making me relive undergraduate school.)
Posted by: Cop Car | February 19, 2016 at 10:12 AM