ox

this might be a fun blog to follow

https://sesquiotic.com/2023/04/20/ox/ 

Marta Zaraska - "How Loneliness Reshapes the Brain"

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-loneliness-reshapes-the-brain-20230228/

 Instead, circuits in our brain and changes in our behavior can trap us in a catch-22 situation: While we desire connection with others, we view them as unreliable, judgmental and unfriendly. Consequently, we keep our distance, consciously or unconsciously spurning potential opportunities for connections.

Zeeya Merali - "God, Dark Matter and Falling Cats"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/god-dark-matter-and-falling-cats-a-conversation-with-2022-templeton-prize-winner-frank-wilczek/

Can you give me some specific examples of how the wisdom you have now but didn’t have earlier in your scientific career has influenced your outlook?

“Complementarity” says that you can’t use a single picture to answer all meaningful questions. You may need very different descriptions, even descriptions that are mutually incomprehensible or superficially contradictory. This concept is absolutely necessary in understanding quantum mechanics, where, for instance, you can’t make predictions about the position and the momentum of an electron simultaneously. When I first encountered Bohr’s ideas about taking complementarity beyond quantum mechanics, I was not impressed. I thought it was borderline bullshit. But I’ve come to realize that it is a much more general piece of wisdom that promotes tolerance and mind expansion. There’s also the scientific attitude that openness and honesty allow people to flourish. It enhances the effectiveness of scientists to have a sort of loving relationship with what they are doing because the work can be frustrating and involves investing in learning some rather dry material. And then there is the lesson of beauty: when you allow yourself to use your imagination, the world repays with wonderful gifts.

R.M. Davis - "What the Higgs boson tells us about the universe"

https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/what-the-higgs-boson-tells-us-about-the-universe

The Higgs field, on the other hand, is just as spinless as the Higgs boson. Like a college senior sitting forlorn in a career counselor’s office, it has no direction.

It’s no coincidence that both the Higgs boson and the Higgs field are spin-zero. “The properties of a particle are essentially properties of the field,” says Peter Onyisi, associate professor of physics for the University of Texas at Austin. Like waves in the ocean, “Higgs bosons are vibrations in a Higgs field.”

Laura J Martin - "Disturbance How atomic doomsday experiments, fuelled by Cold War fears, shaped then shook ecologists’ faith in self-healing nature"

https://aeon.co/essays/how-atomic-doomsday-experiments-shaped-disturbance-ecology

The AEC hoped the Luquillo irradiation experiment would help the mainland prepare for nuclear war. It also intended the irradiation of Luquillo to inform another imperial project, the proposed Project Plowshare Pan-Atomic Canal, a plan to ‘improve’ the Panama Canal (so that it would not require locks to move ships) by detonating a series of H-bombs through Panama. The US Department of Defense also tested Agent Orange and other ‘tactical herbicides’ for use in the Vietnam War at Luquillo. Puerto Rican forests were destroyed in an attempt to plan for the protection of mainland Americans.

S.I. Rosenbaum - "His software sang the words of God, then it fell silent"

https://www.inverse.com/input/features/tropetrainer-thomas-buchler-torah-software

This was a huge problem. Trope are not just melodies — they also function as punctuation, musically joining linguistic clauses or separating them, indicating different kinds of pauses and where verses end. Getting the trope wrong can radically distort the meaning of the text.

Several groups of Jewish scholars, alarmed by this, began working on a solution. What emerged, over several centuries, was a data-storage innovation: a set of marks above and below the letters that indicate both vowels and, crucially, the correct trope for each segment of the text.

The scholars who developed these marks came to be known as Masoretes, from a Hebrew root meaning to pass down — though some argue the term derives from another root, meaning to tie down.

John D. Clark - "Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants"

Only just started but already some gems on fuel situations that went boom

Also, learned about "mach diamonds" or "shock diamond": Shock diamonds (also known as Mach diamonds or thrust diamonds) are a formation of standing wave patterns that appear in the supersonic exhaust plume of an aerospace propulsion system, such as a supersonic jet engine, rocket, ramjet, or scramjet, when it is operated in an atmosphere. The "diamonds" are actually a complex flow field made visible by abrupt changes in local density and pressure as the exhaust passes through a series of standing shock waves and expansion fans. Mach diamonds are named after Ernst Mach, the physicist who first described them.

Esnault-Pelterie use of benzene (as Glushko's of toluene) as a fuel is rather odd. Neither of them is any improvement on gasoline as far as performance goes, and they are both much more expensive. And then Esnault-Pelterie tried to use tetranitromethane, C(NO2), for his oxidizer, and promptly blew off four fingers. (This event was to prove typical of TNM work.)

Unfortunately, in his calculations Dr Eugen Sänger naively assumed 100 percent thermal efficiency, which would involve either (a) an infinite chamber pressure, or (b) a zero exhaust pressure firing into a perfect vacuum, and in either case would require an infinitely long nozzle, which might involve some difficulties in fabrication.

Boranes are unpleasant beasts. Diborane and pentaborane ignite spontaneously in the atmosphere, and the fires are remarkably difficult to extinguish. They react with water to form, eventually, hydrogen and borec acid, and the reaction is sometimes violent. Also, they not only are possessed of a peculiarly repulsive odor; they are extremely poisonous by about any route. This collection of properties does not simplify the problem of handling them. They are also very expensive since their synthesis is neither easy nor simple.
[...]
And then the whole program [chemistry of borohydrides] was brought to a screeching halt. There were two reasons for this, one strategic, one technical. The first was the arrival of the ICBM on the scene, and the declining role of the long-range bomber. The second lay in the fact that the combustion product of boron is boron trioxide (B2O3, and that below about 1800 degrees this is either a solid of a glassy, very viscous liquid. And when you have a turbine spinning at some 4000 rpm, and the clearance between the blades is a few thousandths of an inch, and this sticky, viscous liquid deposits on the blades, the engine is likely to undergo what the British, with precision, call "catastrophic self-disassembly"