Stackin' Papers

Science gets tooted and booted

2011-04-18T20:39:00.000-07:00

YG - Toot It & Boot It [DJ Seko's Jazzy Blend] (cop the whole mix: The Freshest)

Squadda Bambino - I'm Official [Produced by Clams Casino] (act like you know: Space Age Hustle)

Attitude ft. Jackie Chain - Money [Produced by Block Beattaz]

Danny Brown - Cartier Glasses [Produced by 14KT]

Does anyone remember that game SimCity 2000? You know the one... the one where you build a city and then prevent it's demise by a series of horrible disasters, namely alien attack, death by severe and widespread citizen ennui and "a fictitious day in 1995 beset with hordes of drunken lawyers causing riots and mayhem"? That one.

What I remember most about the game, besides not being allowed to purchase it and thus having to "play" it at my buddy's house (ie. my experience with most all video games: watching kids older and smarter than me play them in lieu of actually playing), was a specific strategy in raising the bar at the top right-hand side of the screen indicating the public opinion of the city's "democracy". You simply pressed a button to raise and lower taxes. Upon raising taxes, the citizens would collectively boo (the bar would go down) and upon lowering them, everyone would heartily cheer with approval (and the bar would go up). This was my childhood understanding of government.

Well shit. The budget crisis has been upon us for what feels like the amount of time I spent as a child sitting behind a television screen watching other people play video games. And now that it's temporarily over before Congress starts to figure out the FY2012 budget, I kind of feel like SimCity citizen Joey Joe Joe Jr. Shabadoo: attacked by a slew of inebriated alien lawyers, only to die of boredom because my democratic overlord ran downstairs to grab his 5th bag of gushers.

Scientists appear to be happy with the turnout of the budget compromise. It's true, the government didn't ultimately shut down, an act which would have been horrendously shitty for American's federally-funded scientific enterprise. It's also true that the budgets for the bulk of the US science agencies were cut by around 1%. So, great... let's all applaud and scream with joy? Aww naw. That's some bogus shit right there. One percent is a tremendous sum of money when it comes to the budgets of these agencies. And furthermore, it goes completely counter to Obama's plans for putting science in the forefront of America's discretionary spending budget.

Since the start of his tenure as Playa Prezident, Obama has repped R&D hard. With good reason, science and technology plays a major role in the (pending) success of our economy. Plan was to double funding for key federal science agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy's Office of Science and to raise total national expenditure (public and private) on R&D to 3% of the GDP, a figure which would finally put us on par with about 8 other countries.

This isn't they way we're heading. Obama put forth an even more ambitious plan for science for FY2012, in line with these goals. However, given the results from this year's budgetary debates, we're likely to see little of those increases. Herein lies the problem: what the shit do we do? No seriously. There's so many issues we want to bring change to within the government, science being at the front of my palate at the moment, but how on earth do we collectively enact change? Write your Congressperson, support education, vote Democrat, go green, give more hugs, write a vaguely related blog and update it once a year? When Congress tries the press giant public approval button, side with the drunk space monster attorneys?

It's the roc

2010-11-02T00:21:00.000-07:00

Rittz - Outta Here [Prod. by DJ Burn One] (via: No Trivia)

Quasimoto - Am I Confused? (Astronaut EP, Stones Throw, 2002)

Wyclef - Apocalypse (The Carnival, Sony Music, 1997)

As you're well aware, the 1979 film Meteor, starring Sean Connery alongside the late Natalie Wood, is one of the most important cinematic achievements of the last 100 years. Such an outstanding example of the craftsmanship and untamed majesty in the oft-forgotten disaster film genre could not have been possible without a firm grounding in science.

The science of the pending apocalypse. Yes, it's for real and yes, the government funds it. NASA gets $4 mil annually to look at Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). The same NEOs that inspired such films as Armageddon, Deep Impact and the aforementioned science fiction masterpiece, Meteor.

Shit from outer space hits Earth all the time. However, NEOs are typically just asteroids or comets. Asteroids are non-planetary rocks orbiting the sun (like Pluto, the sucker dwarf planet). Comets are big balls of ice and rock that fly into our solar system from way the fuck out in space. Meteors, or small asteroids, are innocuous and rarely make through the Earth's atmosphere -- they burn up and appear as shooting stars. About 500 meteors a year make it through to the Earth's surface and generally don't do much damage.

Thanks to NASA's efforts, we know of over 7000 NEOs, about 900 of which are considered to be large and potentially dangerous. Peep this:

I recommend you mute the bullshit electronica and soundtrack the video with either this or this depending on how you feel about the situation.

Obama and his top science guy, John "Money Foldin" Holdren, are concerned. Last week they sent a letter over to Congress outlining our current NEO situation and the need for an effective planetary defense system. You know, just in case. But before we all start twistin our own wigs, everyone should know that the next catastrophic asteroid event is scheduled to potentially impact earth in the year 2880. It has a 1 in 300 chance in hitting. In 870 years. Now... who's up for a screening of Meteor? I'm serious. I haven't seen it, so get at me if you're down.

Fiendin for that graphene

2010-10-10T20:54:00.001-07:00

Pha real and his ushanka agree, graphene is number one.

B.G. & Lil Boosie - Louisiana's Finest (224/405 Mixtape, Internet, 2010) (grab it)

Nas - If I Ruled the World ft. Lauryn Hill (Chopped and Screwed)

Mikey Rocks of The Cool Kids - Foreign Features (via)

DMX - Bugout [Prod. by Swizz Beatz] (Ryde or Die Vol. 1, Interscope, 1999)

N.E.R.D. - Hypnotize U [Prod. by Daft Punk] (Nothing, Star Trak, 2010)

Let's talk about real shit. Graphene. What is it and what's its deal? Graphene is a carbon allotrope (like diamond, coal and the ever-popular carbon nanotube), made entirely of carbon atoms arranged in a two-dimensional hexagonal lattice. Last week two Russian-born dudes from the University of Manchester won the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering that graphene can be isolated from graphite, more commonly known as pencil "lead", using household Scotch tape. Graphite is another carbon allotrope made of stacked layers of graphene sheets. Turns out, you can literally just peel off successive layers with tape until you have one sheet left... and voila, you have graphene!

Graphene, as a material, is really fucking awesome. First of all, because of the simple honeycomb structure, much of the associated physics was figured out a long time ago. Theory matches experiment and two-handed scientists everywhere high five themselves on a job well done. If you know basic solid state physics, be sure to check out Doug's write-up -- he gives a really good overview of the neat-o physics involved. Because of the way its band structure (ie. the way electron energy states are distributed) works out, electrons in graphene can move at ultrarelativistic speeds. Such high electron mobility could mean big things for speeding up electronics. Furthermore, some scientists over in Korea got their shit tight and started making wafer-scale sheets of of this stuff. So real life applications may actually come to fruition sometime in the near future.

However, this Nobel Prize gets some flack from the physics peanut gallery, who strongly caution against graphene overhype. Given the similar hype history of the carbon nanotube and the fact that there is still no space elevator, I do think it's best to stay away from words like 'revolutionize' and 'wonder material'. Plus, there's a pretty reasonable beef about the Geim and Novoselov being the only awardees (of an available three spots) when there were a ton of big players after the initial 2004 paper who contributed to graphene's current rep.

Regardless of all the haters, the Nobel Foundation did right by naming the pair of Russian-born British bros as the winners. The U.K. is at risk of facing some serious science funding cuts. The Nobel Prize in Medicine this year also went a British scientist, so hopefully the U.K. government will take notice of the good science can do for society and not do something retarded.

Stack Papers:
Rice University Baker Institute Blog: Graphene, fundamental physics and the promise of future technologies
Geim & Novoselov's 2004 paper: Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films
Nobel Foundation: Public Information & Advanced Scientific Background
Nanoscale Views: Graphene Part I & Graphene Part II -- Pseudospin

Flip it out and unroll it

2009-11-18T16:54:00.000-08:00

One sheet.

Raekwon - Surgical Gloves (Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II, EMI Records, 2009)

Paul Wall ft. Chamillionaire - Bk Flow

Curren$y and Wiz Khalifa - Car Service (How Fly Mixtape, 2009)

Last week my inner-nerd and I got super amped about a documentary on paper folding coming to Rice, called Between the Folds. The film had an very short, very engaging trailer, highlighted with a couple scholarly looking men with charming foreign accents and several very geeky looking dudes with peachfuzz-turned-beard facial hair hinting at the joys and applications of paper folding. The trailer and cover boast that origami is no mere craft, but rather, that it stands at the intersection between science and art, revealing deep truths about nature and mathematics in addition to being strikingly beautiful.

It's true, people can do some crazy shit with one sheet of paper, but the movie left me hanging when it came to the mathematics and science behind it all; it played more like an extended trailer than a documentary. I think what the movie failed to make clear is that much of the research in origami falls into pure mathematics. That is, it's studied from a completely academic point of view, rather than being developed for for a specific purpose: can we tell if a give set of creases on a piece of paper will fold up to lie flat? Can we find crease patterns and a corresponding folding sequence to reproduce any three dimensional object? What three dimensional shapes can we make given with an arbitrary amount of folds and one straight cut? And as the origami uber-enthusiast states in the trailer, what are the limits, the physical limits, of what we can do with paper? Turns out, these problems can be stated pretty easily, but rely on a deep theoretical and computational framework that even I, gawd-bodied physics genius that I am, have no motivation or hope of understanding*.

That isn't to say that origami math hasn't produces some really interesting practical innovations, because virtually any time something needs to be compressed smaller in a repeatable way, paper folding theory has got it covered -- airbags, packaging, expandable medical stents (!), shopping bags, etc. What I find most interesting about origami are the unexpected bits of usefulness that fall right out of this complex theory, not just in two dimensions (paper), but in one dimension and in higher dimensions. Noted origami mathematician, Robert Lang provides a neat example:

Whenever you’re developing new mathematics, there’s always that possibility. The hallmark of these sorts of surprise applications is that they always turn out to have been a surprise. There is a great example of this that is close to origami. In technical origami when we’re designing complicated forms like many-legged insects, we use a technique called “circle packing” which basically asks the question how can you efficiently pack a bunch of circles into various shaped containers. Now over the years mathematicians have also studied how to pack spherical objects into higher-dimensional spaces and how close a packing you can get. Well, it turned out that in 24 dimensions there is a particularly dense packing. That sounds about as irrelevant an idea as you can get, except it turns out that 24-dimensional packing gives a very dense compression algorithm for sending data. So using this 24-dimensional sphere packing result has become the basis for developing a very efficient code for 24-bit binary words. Now, who would have predicted that? (via)

In the film, Erik Demaine repped protein folding pretty hard. Demaine and crew are taking a crack at solving the protein folding problem using origami theory applied in one dimension. Again, the problem is very simply stated (how do specific proteins obtain their geometries?) but the theory is extremely heavy. Demaine explains:

With our current knowledge, we can predict the primary sequence of amino acids in a protein from the DNA sequence of a gene. However, the key to protein function lies in the secondary and tertiary interactions between those amino acids that occur as a result of a process called protein folding. Protein folding takes a linear sequence of amino acids and creates a three-dimensional molecule with a defined structure. Within this defined structure lies the functional attributes of the protein. Therefore, if we can understand the process of attaining the folded state, we can predict the structure as well as the function of proteins from genomic sequence. (via)

The problem is so difficult, in part, due to the large number of possible stable configurations a given protein could potentially fold into, to minimize its total energy. In fact, there are so many degrees of freedom, that computer simulations have yet to become an efficient way of solving the problem, although it appears that Demaine and the MIT massive are making some serious headway.

In the meantime, we normals can try some protein folding of our own. The University of Washington created a game, Foldit, where the goal is to fold a given protein into it's lowest energy configuration. Due to the extreme computational complexity, we can be a bit more helpful than computers in this case, using a bit of intuition, rather than brute-force trying to try millions of different folding possibilities. I've been playing a little bit just for shits, and the game's actually quite a challenge. If you're interested, but wouldn't be caught dead playing a video game, Stanford's come up with a solution: Folding@home, where you can help the cause but not look like a total dweeb. This software uses a tiny bit of your computing power in conjunction with over a million others to run folding simulation scripts (similar to what they're doing with primes).

* If you would like to learn more, Demaine has a book out with his collaborator Joseph O'Rouke from Smith College: Geometric Folding Algorithms. The book is written for advanced undergrads with a strong math background. I've worked through pieces of it, and found the text pretty engaging. And, like they hint at in the movie, the book sheds some light on the connections between origami and other areas of mathematics.

Stack Papers:
The New Yorker: The Origami Lab
NY Times: Origami as the Shape of Things to Come
The Institute for Figuring: An Interview with Robert Lang
Thomas Hull: Origami Math
Bonus from Hull's site: Mathematica file on rigid folding here (right click to download)

Ya wrist bling bling, my shit bling bl-ooww

2009-07-07T19:13:00.000-07:00

Diamond and the Psychotic Neurotics - What U Heard (Stunts, Blunts and Hip Hop, PolyGram Records, 1992)

Super cool NOVA video on synthetic diamonds. The whole thing's a little cheesy, but they talk a bit about the science and there's a pretty sick time-lapse shot of the diamonds actually growing. As a bonus, here's a little more info on the growth process using Tequila they mention at the end of the video, from the best website on the intenet.

(via: Uncertain Principles)

Radiant Jewels

2009-07-01T20:47:00.000-07:00

I'm diggin' this color scheme.

Wu-Tang Clan - Radiant Jewels ft. Raekwon, Cormega & Sean Price (Chamber Music, Universal, 2009)

I am so amped about this album... it's out this week and my copy's in the mail. Perfect mix of characters on this track. (via: Straight Bangin', Nah Right)

Mos Def - Auditorium ft. Slick Rick (The Ecstatic, Downtown, 2009)

Been out for a minute now... this my favorite song off the album. Mos did right by getting Madlib and his fam on the boards for half the record. Bonus: my all-time favorite rap-related, non-music video youtube clip, if you haven't already seen it. (via: No Trivia)

Major Lazer - Can't Stop Now (Guns Don't Kill People... Lazers Do, Mad Decent, 2009)

I enjoy almost everything Diplo puts out, and this album is no different; it's fun and creative music. Unfortunately, he seems to polarize a lot his potential audience. The rap bloggers get on their high horses for stuff like this, and get pretty malicious about it, while the people they're accusing as hipster douchebags, laud the album genre-hopping genius. It's the same reason Fear and Loathing in Huntsvegas is last year's most slept on album. What happened to just being a fan of good music?

Pink Dollaz - Don't Need No

This song is straight up infectious. Plus, these girls actually spit pretty hard. I instinctively start jerkin' (err... not quite what you might think) whenever I put it on. And yes, I look even more ridiculous, if that's even possible. (via: Cocaine Blunts and Hip-Hop Tapes)

Erykah Badu & The Roots - I Wanna Be Where You Are (MJ Cover)

As the story goes, Erykah and The Roots crew had a secret recording session before her set on Jimmy Fallon. (via: Nah Right, gorillavsbear)

What the hell is that noise?

2009-06-21T19:26:00.000-07:00

Go buy Exile's album; its one of this year's best. Stream the whole thing here first.

Exile - It's Coming Down (Radio, Plug Research, 2009)

The concept of noise ranks second among the top 3 things I should have learned before coming to graduate school. It sits right behind the how to not dress like a scrub (still working on it… ugh) and is directly followed by my discovery of coffee. Turns out, accounting for and avoiding noise is pretty much super important for every experiment you might want to do.

Noise comes in many different forms and is characterized by its frequency spectrum. Think of noise like you would any other type of electromagnetic or acoustic signal: as sine waves propagating through space, specified by a range of frequencies and directions. A noise source’s frequency spectrum is just the amplitude of each frequency plotted as a function of frequency. Partially synesthetic engineers have named most of the common frequency spectra of noise with a color: white, brown, pink, etc.

I classify noise into two categories: boring and not-boring*. Boring noise consists of ever-present Johnson noise (arising from thermal vibrations – partially responsible for radio interference and video static) and flicker noise (ubiquitous low frequency noise intrinsic to many systems). This noise you almost always want to try to minimize or skirt around somehow. Not-boring noise, not surprisingly, can tell you something interesting. The two forms on not-boring noise I’m most familiar with are shot noise and telegraph noise.

Shot noise comes from fact that electrons carry a discrete amount of charge. This means that an electronic current is not a continuous stream of charge, but rather a collection of individual charges which move through different circuit elements at different rates. The rate at which electrons pass through a given element is a well-defined, statistical process. However, in mesoscopic systems, where circuit elements can be made up of single molecules, quantum dots or other nanoscale materials, shot noise can deviate from its usual statistics. When this happens, it is usually an indication of various quantum mechanical phenomena, such as electron-electron or electron-vibration interactions. Shot noise can directly measure how electrons talk to each other and to phonons!

Telegraph noise refers to sporadic fluctuations between two conductance states in some semiconducting devices. Unlike shot noise, telegraph noise isn’t always just some tiny signal that normally takes several graduate students and dewars, upon dewars of cryogens to see; it can be a substantial portion of the total current passing through the device. Telegraph noise is generally associated** with the trapping and de-trapping of individual charge carriers (ie. electrons) by near-by impurities (say, a water molecule). That is, electrons will tunnel to and from the impurity to the semiconducting channel, shifting the measured current up and down. What’s super neat is that you can back out the energy*** and physical location of the impurity fairly accurately by looking at the rate at which the electrons are trapped and released.

Stack Papers:
O. Tal, et. al.: Electron-vibration interaction in single-molecule junctions
Ya. M. Blanter and M. Buttiker: Shot Noise in Mesoscopic Conductors
E. Sela, et. al.: Fractional Shot Noise in the Kondo Regime
L. Saminadayar, et. al.: Observation of the e/3 fractionally charged Laughlin quasiparticles
J. Chan, et. al.: Reversal of current blockade through multiple trap correlations

* This isn’t true. There’s a lot to be learned from Johnson and flicker noise, I just don’t know too much about either. A better categorization would be: noise-I-know-shit-about and noise-I-don’t-know-shit-about.
** This isn't strictly true, either… ask me for a neat story from the lab!
***With respect to the Fermi energy of the semiconducting channel.

Tufte Titty

2009-06-05T09:28:00.000-07:00

My 18th birthday was the worst birthday I’ve ever had. In the dead of a D.C. summer, my pops decided it was time to re-shingle the roof. The ‘work harder, not smarter’ rule applied: get a crowbar and go nuts. Being 18 and about to leave the nest forever, working from dawn ‘til dust (in adolescent hours, say noon-10pm) on a project for the fam was torture. I took out my angst on each and every 50 year old, tar-covered nail. Luckily for me, my dad more than made up for it later that night, handing me the two most coveted presents by any BET-crazed, suburban white kid’s standards: a fishing rod and what appeared to be a math book.

Years later, I found a copy of Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative by Edward Tufte, still sitting in its shrink wrap. Knee-deep in science/math by this point, the book turned out to be every internet-crazed, college-aged, physics nerd’s wet dream: beautiful, historically relevant and dense with clearly accessible information.

The internet loves information graphics almost as much as it loves kittens and pornography*. Here are some good examples of visual displays of quantitative information I’ve come across in the past month or so (with some jams of the day, as always):

Nas - One Love (One L Mix)

Is everything that comes out of MIT bonkers awesome? From their site:

World Within New York shows how different neighborhoods reach out to the rest of the world via the AT&T telephone network. The city is divided into a grid of 2-kilometer square pixels where each pixel is colored according to the regions of the world wherein the top connecting cities are located. The widths of the color bars represent the proportion of world regions in contact with each neighborhood. Encoded within each pixel is also a list of the world cities that account for 70% of the communications with that particular area of New York.

(image via: MIT Senseable Lab, music via: A Tribute To Ignorance)

P. Dukes - That's What I Do

Eigenfactor interactively displays all of the citation links between different journals, spanning each major scientific discipline, from 1997 to 2005; this is just one particularly pretty screenshot. You really need to go try it out to understand just how awesome it is. I do wonder, though, how different this graph would look with the inclusion of Nano Letters, from 2005 to present.

(image via: Well-Formed.Eigenfactor.Org, music via: Traps n Trunks)

Clipse - Virginia (Team Teamwork Remix)

This is one of my favorites from the myriad of nice examples that pop up daily on ffffound. Simple, clear and informative. The original source is Deliver Magazine (Issue 24, Page 7).

(image via: ffffound, music via: BOOOOOOOM)

*Note: This is distinctly untrue.

Detroit Falls

2009-05-31T15:37:00.001-07:00

Vaguely related: 100 Abandoned Houses

Pariah - Detriot Falls Mixdown

This song is straight fire. (via: gorillavsbear)

Wale - Hot Shyt ft. Peedi Crakk, Tuphace, Young Chris and Black Thought

Rep D.C. all day. Wale has a new album Back To The Feature coming out this year sometime. Get familiar: 100 Miles and Running and The Mixtape About Nothing are free for download and amazing. (via: Passion of the Weiss)

Damu The Fudgemunk - The Bright Side

Newish rapper/producer Damu The Fudgemunk out of D.C. is building up a really solid body of work, almost all of which is free. (via: Hollis Park)

Grizzly Bear - Two Weeks (Tomato Remix)

I'm well aware mash-ups are all but played out at this point. That doesn't mean we can't take them for what they are and enjoy it when a song knocks. This particular track rests on the strength of Grizzly Bear's new single, the fact that Jay's verses sound fresh over almost anything and the age-old (in internet years) formula Gregg Gillis has perfected. (via: i guess i'm floating)

Pill - Music

New track from Pill. He let out a mixtape earlier this year, which is pretty dope. Download the whole thing for free here. (via: BLVD ST)

Doped Up: the p-n junction

2009-05-27T00:21:00.001-07:00

Bring your nocs.

J Dilla - Lightworks (Flying Lotus Remix) (Shhh! EP, Unreleased, 2008)

Several years ago, my family decided to make the shift from incandescent light bulbs, to the more energy efficient, compact fluorescents. Two weeks later, we returned our lifetime supply back to Costco. Our feeble attempt to save the planet was met with harsh, bluish light and a faint, yet persistent, buzzing.

Science has dropped the ball on a number of important promises for the future, but none quite as important as the energy crisis. In an effort to start considering the possibility of making this issue into the beginnings of a mildly serious concern, the U.S. has taken the bold step of planning to phase out incandescent light bulbs by 2012.

While tungsten filaments give us the flattering, warm light we’ve all become accustomed to, they’re hideously inefficient at converting electricity into light; around 95% of the energy input leaves the filament in the form of heat. This converts to an efficiency of about 15 lumens per watt. Compact fluorescents are a little better at 10-15% efficiency, or about 60-70 lumens per watt. In last week’s edition of Nature, scientists in Germany have improved upon one of the leading contenders for overtaking our outdated bulbs, organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). They report an efficiency of 90 lumens per watt.

Organic LEDs function much in the same way as their solid-state brethren, only with organic materials (stuff with carbon in it) used in place of traditional, solid-state semiconductors. What’s so exciting about organic electronics is how they’re produced. You can literally print organic electronics using inkjet printers. This means that they’re substantially less expensive, more convenient and can be fabricated on flexible or transparent substrates. Engineering OLEDs to emit white light efficiently is major step towards tossing out our old bulbs. Much respect to the Institut für Angewandte Photophysik, doing it big in Dresden, Germany.

Recognize game:
NY Times: Industry Looks to LED Bulbs for the Home
arXiv blog: Ultra-Efficient Organic LEDs
Physics World: Bright white light from organic LEDs
Stackin' Papers: An extraordinarily dry write-up about how LEDs work. More/Less

Fourier Transforms... wtf?

2009-05-24T12:42:00.000-07:00

Scrub life.

People Under The Stairs - Ten Tough Guys (The Next Step, Om Records, 1998)

During the beginning of my collegiate math career, I sat in the back of class doing some serious mean muggin’. Math only got harder after calculus, and it seemed to drift further and further away from anything remotely tied to real life.

Ironically, the class where I struggled most with motivation was in a course entitled Introduction to Engineering Mathematics. We did it all: vector calculus, linear algebra, complex variables, differential equations, Fourier expansions, etc. I scraped by with a B-, renewing the indifference towards math I’d developed in high school. It wasn’t until I took quantum and solid-state physics that I shed my best Ice Cube impression and moved to the front row.

Physics and Physicists wrote a blurb yesterday about student who used Fourier analysis to deconstruct the previously irreproducible, opening chord on the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night”. Fourier Transforms had always seemed particularly boring. Turns out, they’re still boring... but pretty useful.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Frenchman “Sean Jean” Baptiste Joseph Fourier developed a method to described functions as infinite sums of much simpler, trigonometric functions (ie. sines and cosines). This technique comes in handy for solving a lot of differential equations, such as the heat equation, some forms of Poisson’s equations, the Schrodinger equation, etc. Fourier analysis also led to the concept of the Fourier Transform.

A Fourier Transform takes a function of one variable and ‘transforms’ it into a function of another variable. The Beatles chord provides a nice example. We usually think of music in the time domain. That is, as a bunch of compression waves (think slinky) which propagate through space at some wavelength to our ears as a function of time. So, if you look at the sound in the time domain, you’ll see a mess of oscillations… not very helpful. However, if you transform said oscillations into the frequency domain, where the sound is now a function of frequency (remember, the frequency of a wave is inversely proportional to its wavelength), you’ll see a bunch of peaks corresponding to specific notes and instruments played… much easier.

New Music from Old Rappers

2009-05-16T23:05:00.000-07:00

They're damn near 40.

U-God - Train Trussle ft. Ghostface (Dopium, Babygrande, 2009)

Everyone who knows me knows just how much I love Wu-Tang. This song is excellent. New U-God solo album Dopium dropping in June.(via: Passion of the Weiss)

Busta Rhymes - Director's Cut ft. Uncle Murda (Back On My B.S., Universal Motown, 2009)

One of the best non-fast rap Busta song I've ever heard. His new album Back on my B.S. comes out next week.(via: Straight Bangin')

DOOM - More Rhymin' (BORN LIKE THIS, Lex Records, 2009)

Metal Face delivers. BORN LIKE THIS is in stores.

DJ Paul - She Wanna Get High ft. Lord Infamous (Scale-A-Ton, Hypnotize Minds, 2009)

I'm a sucker for Three 6. Always have been, always will be. DJ Paul let out a solo album Scale-A-Ton earlier this month.(via: No Trivia)

De La Soul - Big Mouf (Are You In?: Nike+ Original Run, Nike Inc., 2009)

New from De La, off the recent collabo with Nike. (via: Passion of the Weiss)

Geeked Up

2009-05-16T22:08:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure this is what Gucci's talking about.

Gucci Mane - Pillz (Proper Villains Remix)

Physicists love nomenclature. They love to coin names for emerging fields, devise catchy acronyms for longwinded laboratory setups and abbreviate any word over two syllables. Think late 90s AIMers, only thirty years older with PhDs in engineering. While acronyms and abbreviations make sense for daily inter-physicist use, they serve as the first major barrier between the scientist and the public. For example, today I spent my morning doing EBL and my afternoon modeling plasmonic field enhancements in electromigrated nanogaps in a FEM software package called COMSOL. Uh… what?

I work in the field of condensed matter physics. Condensed matter refers to the study of materials in a condensed phase. Condensed phases include the solid phase (ie. ice, steel, etc.) that we are all familiar with, as well as more exotic states of matter such as superconductivity, ferromagnetism and Bose-Einstein condensation. Much of the time, this boils down to figuring out how electrons behave in solids, or in matter which acts a lot like a solid. For this reason, I've always thought of condensed matter as a souped-up version of solid-state physics with a name engineered to sound both more badass and more obtuse.

Condensed matter is as expansive as it is rich. It ranges from very hardcore theory of interacting systems, to more technology-driven experimental research. If you want to get a good idea of the breadth of current research topics, go check out the list of subjects on the arXiv.

Much of today’s condensed matter research focuses on physics at very small length scales. Such systems are deemed mesoscopic or nanoscale. Most of what I will touch upon in this blog will fall into this category. Both terms describe systems where quantum mechanics play a definite role, but where atoms don’t necessarily have to be considered individually. To give you a sense of scale, transistors in modern microprocessors are between 30-40 nanometers in length. One nanometer is a billionth of a meter, or 10e-9. An atom has a typical diameter of an angstrom, or 10e-10. Think about it… that’s insane.

Simplifyyyy, maaaaan

2009-05-10T00:32:00.001-07:00

The Roots - Table of Contents (Parts 1 & 2) (Things Fall Apart, Geffen/MCA, 1999)

I remember the first time I tried to explain what I do in the lab to my grandmother. A string of completely unintelligible acronyms and buzz words shot out of my mouth and straight over the head of my caring, but only mildly interested, 78 year old granny. She just smiled, offered me another slice of coconut custard and turned back to watching All My Children.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t just grandma. I stuttered through unnecessarily difficult language to everyone who asked me about what it’s like to be a physicist. At first, my inability to convey my research to others stemmed from a severe lack of knowledge on the subject; I spent (and spend) a great deal of time confused. It’s true: studies have shown that science is hard. But, it’s not that hard.

For some time, I subscribed to the all-too-common idea that physics is somehow more difficult than other areas of academics. As an undergraduate, I was led to believe that I was somehow part of an exclusive club: geniuses only. Herein lies the point of this blog. All science, physics included, should be totally accessible. If it’s not, then it isn’t being explained properly.

Worse yet, as has been previously noted, experimental and theoretical physics (condensed matter, AMO, quantum, and, to a lesser extent, biophysics, etc. -- more on these terms later) outside of astro- and nuclear physics seem to receive little attention outside of scientific journals. In media sources geared towards the general public, science is divided into health, the environment, technology, or space and high-energy physics.

With all of this in mind, I’ve decided to blog about what I read and learn about physics and soundtrack it with hip-hop. I’m here to hold it down for my artsy crew in Houston, my ironically lame dentist best friend, all my fam out in Cali (I see you KD!), the whole Lancaster massive, my peoples in DC & VA and anyone and everyone else who has an interest in the physical sciences and/or rap music. Word is bond.