Various
240. On credit market debt
According to our tradition, no science discussions are allowed on Sunday (a gentleman has to be able to find fun beyond the area of his expertise), except maybe video of the day.
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239. Susskind’s lectures on general relativity
A most natural generalization of the lectures posted yesterday and on Friday 
238. Twitter updates for 2009-02-07
- New metallic carbon crystal: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.110…..102.055703 #prl #carbon #
- Computational power of correlations: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.110…..102.050502 #quantum #
- Quantum fluctuations in small lasers: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.110…..102.053902 #prl #laser #
- It seems that Senate is going to cut the funding of NSF: http://short.to/rem #nsf #
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237. What is eternal inflation?
Via immortal xkcd.
236. Video of the day: Susskind’s lectures on special relativity 5 – 8
Continuation of the lectures posted yesterday.
235. Twitter updates for 2009-02-06
- Singularity University – overview: http://singularityu.org/overview/ #transhumanism #
- Mini-course on Mach’s principle: http://pirsa.org/09020029/ #mach PI does become a Theoretical Institute for Theology. #
- How to evaluate lab work: http://is.gd/itYf #science #
- Looking for dark matter in wrong places: http://short.to/r9t #cosmology #darkmatter #
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233. Video of the day: Susskind’s lectures on special relativity 1 – 4
Fun to watch even for professional physicist – he also effectively teaches quite well how to present the subject. The lectures are quite extended (more than 1 hr 30 min each), so I’ll post one part today and another – tomorrow.
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232. Twitter updates for 2009-02-05
- Clifford Johnson http://snipr.com/bb3p5 (or more accurately Joe Polchinski) explains what is string theory #strings #stringtheory #
- Corot-Exo-7b: Venus from the other world – http://www.obspm.fr/actual/nou…..7.en.shtml #planetology Another distant planet! #
- David Berenstein is doing physics as two level system: http://jijr.com/lml #physics #fun #
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231. Don’t EVER criticize string theory
By Abstruse Goose (found via Clifford Johnson).
230. Video of the day: viscosity or the arrow of time is reversible
A lot of fun to watch 
CP is clearly conserved in this experiment LOL
LM explanation of the effect: The reason why it looks counterintuitive is the people normally confuse chaotic motion and organized motion.
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229. Twitter updates for 2009-02-04
- David Wands on asymmetric universe: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphys1195 #nature #cosmology #
- Fluid dynamics: bounce to chaos http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphys1187 #nature #hydrodynamics #
- Long lived quantum memory: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphys1152 #nature #quantum #
- FIRST robotic challenge 2009: http://is.gd/ih0R #robotic #
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228. Book review: D. Yoshioka. The quantum Hall effect
About a week ago we have briefly discussed the physics of the quantum Hall effect. Let me remind you the conclusions we came to.
We discriminate between the integer and fractional quantum Hall effects according to the value of the filling factor 
. The latter characterizes the many-particle wave function describing behaviour of electrons in the sample. effectively depends only on which Landau levels are filled and which – aren’t, i.e., on 
and ultimately on Landau levels themselves (that is, the value of magnetic field we apply to the sample).
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227. Video of the day: Meissner effect in superconductors
Here is the video related to the Problem N8 that we have discussed yesterday (what you see is probably high 
superconductor – the liquid that the guy uses seems to be liquid nitrogen).
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226. Top ten open problems in physics
What is the ultimate purpose of my work as theoretical physicist and, if you want, my existence itself? Is it serving the community of other physicists like organizing and participating in conferences? Nop. Then, maybe teaching future physicists in the University, encourage young people to enter the exciting field of physics? Not quite. Writing good papers? Ei. Maybe blogging? Sorry but nein. I think… the ultimate purpose of my work is solving unsolved mysteries in physics. I am afraid, this and only this makes my work enjoyable for me, makes it fun. For the sake of future reference, let me enlist here the most important (from my point of view), hard and interesting unsolved problems in physics.
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225. Video of the day: Google Earth 5 beta
New Google Earth beta version has been recently released and it is just amazingly cool: it supports historical imagery (that is, you can see how the part of the Earth’s surface you are interested in looked like 50, 100, 10000 years ago), ocean data (that is, you can now study the ocean’s floor with Google Earth!) and even 3D map of Mars. Below is the official announcement video:
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