Squiggle It, Just A Little Bit…

About a week or so ago, Dear Reader, I mentioned in the blurb atop of a missive from Cade, a magazine article that I was keen to get my hands on…

FOR years after the physicist Richard Feynman died, his 1970s yellow-and-tan Dodge minivan lay rusting in a garage near Pasadena, California. When it was restored in 2012, special effort was made to repaint the giant doodles that adorned its bodywork. They don’t look like much – simple combinations of straight lines, loops and squiggles. But it is no exaggeration to say these Feynman diagrams revolutionised particle physics. Without them, we might never have built the standard model of particles and forces, or discovered the Higgs boson.

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Now we could be on the cusp of a second, even more far-reaching transformation. Because even as Feynman’s revolution seems to be fizzling out, physicists are discovering hints of deeper geometric truths. If glimpses of exquisite mathematical structures that exist in dimensions beyond the familiar few can be substantiated, they would seem to point the way to a better understanding not just of how particles interact, but of the nature of reality itself.

https://youtu.be/MHHv4u8Vomw

It was a hard road that led to the standard model, this monumental theoretical construct that describes all the particles of the quantum world and the forces that act on them, except for gravity. The starting point came in the 1930s and early 1940s, when physicists investigating quantum electrodynamics, the theory of how charged particles and electromagnetic fields interact, embarked on calculations of “scattering amplitudes” – the probabilities of different outcomes in a given particle interaction. But the calculations proved maddeningly difficult. For a while they seemed impossible.

https://youtu.be/VWy_VelIn4w

Then along came Feynman. In 1949, he showed…

And that was all I could read of the article… Until yesterday, when I got home from work and found a copy of the magazine had arrived from Leggy, with a note saying…

‘Thought you might like to see this comic. It would just have ended up in recycling anyway, at least this way its life gets extended by a few days 😉 ‘

New Scientist cover

Woo Hoo! I was so excited as I flipped the pages…

*That’s right, Clicky… pages 28 – 31, right…*

Centre fold 1

*…in the…*

Centre fold 2

*…middle…*

Centre fold 3

*Hmm… Superconducting Super Collider in Texas… Reminds me of another Missive From ‘Merica, Clicky… the one with the drawings…*

Principle of Least Action

*Whoa! The Principle of Least Action? …That seems a bit Idle Theory-ish… /cough… Yeah, I think we’ve probably shown enough of the article, now Clicky… I don’t want to get in trouble…*

*/nods… I’ll go tell Cade I’ve updated his missive…*

Okay, I have a lot to do tonight, Dear Reader – early start at work tomorrow. Make of it as you will… And have a Song ;

Missive From ‘Merica: Tales of Tooth

Social media has gone mad for a picture of a hare with a cigarette in its mouth taken at Dublin Airport on Sunday.

Dear Reader, I saw the photo of the smoking leporid on Twitter this morning…

… However, all is not what it seems…

But Dublin Airport have revealed the truth about the animal – it actually has an overgrown tooth.

They said: “Sorry to spoil all the online jokes, but don’t think that hare has a cigarette in its mouth. It’s more likely an overgrown tooth.”

https://youtu.be/–6JC8talKg

… I got a missive this morning from Cade about a missing tooth…

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Maybe it's time we discussed my missing tooth...

I had been a professional hockey player for most my career until I retired at the end of it. I was the top scoring goalie of all time, averaging an average of 16 touchdowns per game on average. Our team was on our way to our third consecutive NASCAR Winston Cup Championship, and if we could win this final game, we’d achieve it. However, we were playing our old nemisiseses on their own turf, which was actually ice and not turf, but whatever.

Their lead-defenseman was somehow this old goalie’s personal nemesis, but only because I played more offense than defense, and it pissed this guy off no end that a goalie was scoring all the goals and setting all the records. As a matter of fact, the only scoring record that I didn’t hold was scoring on myself, which they don’t have a record for. Interesting footnote here…the league considered creating such a category to make things a little more fair for anyone playing us, but never did.

The day finally arrived. It was raining heavily just prior to the game start, and there was concern as to how it would affect our performance as a team. There was even discussion amongst the league officials as to whether the game should even be played at all or postponed until the weather cleared. But once we got indoors and inside the arena, those fears faded. The game…was on.

The game had been going on since the starter shot a hole in the green flag with a flare gun. Tt was a massacre. We had scored so many touchdowns in the first 3 first-halves of play, that the officials stopped keeping score. This angered our nemisiseses, who had not scored a point all night because they felt like they were being taunted by the “999” on the three-numbered scoreboard. But that’s as high as it went…so contact the manufacturer’s customer service in the off-season.

There were only 7 more quarters or so left to play and we were winning. As they were no longer keeping score I just hovered by the beer cart near the net at my end. My nemesis couldn’t get at me at this end. Besides I was getting pretty fucking drunk by that point anyway, and the last thing we need in a hockey game is a rugby scrum. Little did I know that’s exactly what we were about to get.

I had been averaging over 17 minutes of play-time per quarter during the game, which is weird because there are only 15 minutes in a quarter. Now that the game was all but wrapped up, I was averaging 18 beers per quarter, which is pretty cheap.

Anyway…their main forward spun out in turn two, hit the retaining wall at full-speed, but was able to hit the eject button in time and was now dangling from his parachute in the rafters. This meant he was out for the remainder of the game when they could safely drag the ladders out onto the ice to retrieve him.

As a result, their team called for “the double-substitution”. This allowed them to switch a defenseman to offense (if they are doing so badly that this is really the only option they have left), but since they called the double-sub, this meant that the player’s stick has suddenly become defective and/or unusable. If there is no suitable replacement equipment available, he can use whatever is handy to replace it with.

Had I known that there was a rugby tournament in the arena the night before, what happened next probably wouldn’t have been so confusing to me. One of the rugby players had apparently left some of equipment from the night before in our nemisiseses’ pit stalls, and so…he came at me with a cricket bat.

I mean…the guy didn’t even have the puck. He just came at me, full speed, with that big ass bat’s business end pointed right at me. I was already so drunk that I assumed it was some sort of trick play. Plus, I had almost half a beer left, so it took me a moment to decide whether to set the cup down and finish it later, or if I had time to slam it back and throw the cup at him before he got to me.

I opted for the latter, and don’t remember much after that. I hear there’s a video of it on YouTube tho. I dunno. I haven’t re-watched it in a long time.

Anyway, I lost a tooth in the process.

(Story inspired by someone tweeting something about Hockey on Twitter)

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^Gnarls Barkley – Crazy^

*******

*Any luck finding that video on YouTube, Clicky?*

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*Aw never mind… /pats snout…*

Now, Cade and the hockey fan, Kitty, both live in Texas and today there was another story about a kerfuffle in Texas with ICE…

Texas Democrat Threatens To Kill Republican On Legislative Floor After He Called ICE On Protesting Illegal Immigrants.

*Goodbye? Already? What no Song, Clicky?*