Longest Running Thread EVER

[L. Marcus]

Who?

[Cancer]

US woman gymnast who was at the zenith of popularity in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

[L. Marcus]

That's the year I turned nine.

[Cancer]

28 for me.  Not that I watched any of the Olympics IIRC, but it was a media stampede.

[L. Marcus]

The media can be silly like that. 

[Cancer]

It is their role to be that way.  Or at least they think so.

[Cancer]

Part of northern Sweden is full of rocket shelters

[L. Marcus]

Snug and cozy. 

[Cancer]

Listening to a hummingbird across the street curse at something I can't see.

[Cancer]

My son bought a rapier with some meteoritic iron in it.

[Cancer]

On 10/10/2017 at 10:36 PM, Cancer said:

Putting this here for Lucius, since it's prose follow-up to something in the haiku thread.

 

There seem to be three flavor eigenstates, or just flavors, of neutrinos: each neutrino is associated with a lepton. Electron neutrinos go with electrons (and anti-electrons, a/k/a positrons). Muon neutrinos go with muons and their antiparticle. Tau neutrinos go with tau leptons. These flavors matter for reactions with other particles. As an example, an isolated neutron is unstable and it will decay into a proton, an electron, and a neutrino. That neutrino is *always* an electron neutrino. There are other reactions that will produce particles including a muon and a neutrino. In such a reaction, that neutrino is *always* a muon neutrino.

 

If messed with, though, one flavor of neutrino can turn into a different flavor. That is, once an electron neutrino is made, somewhere later in its travel if you try catching it, it may no longer be an electron neutrino; it may be a muon neutrino.

 

This can only happen if the neutrinos have a nonzero mass (in the original concept, and for decades thereafter, it was assumed they were massless) and if the masses are modestly different and the actual "real masses" of the neutrinos are not exactly the same as the average masses of the three neutrino flavors. In that case, a neutrino in one of these "mass eigenstates" will be a mixture of more than one of the flavors, and the probability of finding a particular neutrino as a particular flavor varies as the neutrino travels. It oscillates among the flavors. ...

 

Following up on this a bit more, since there was something among my news feeds bearing on this this morning.

 

The lightest neutrino mass is no larger than 0.086 eV/c2.  In other words, it is at least 6 million times "lighter" than the electron (the electron mass is about half a mega-electron-volt; the lightest neutrino mass is no larger than 86 milli-electron-volts).  This comes out of a simultaneous fit to particle physics data and cosmology data (the neutrino mass does have observable effects in the distribution of galaxies in the Universe).

[Bazza]

Bump

[Cancer]

On August 23, 2019 at 9:56 AM, Cancer said:

 

Following up on this a bit more, since there was something among my news feeds bearing on this this morning.

 

The lightest neutrino mass is no larger than 0.086 eV/c2.  In other words, it is at least 6 million times "lighter" than the electron (the electron mass is about half a mega-electron-volt; the lightest neutrino mass is no larger than 86 milli-electron-volts).  This comes out of a simultaneous fit to particle physics data and cosmology data (the neutrino mass does have observable effects in the distribution of galaxies in the Universe).

 

New direct measurement in a lab in Germany puts the upper limit at 1.1 eV.

[L. Marcus]

Gasp! The neutrinos ... have mutated!

[Cancer]

Not necessarily... or even at all likely.  Just  two entirely different approaches giving consistent results, accounting for the different sensitivities of the two methods.

[L. Marcus]

Awww ... I wanted my 2012.

[Cancer]

The album?  One of the disaster movies?  The election?   The baktun rollover?

[L. Marcus]

The mutating neutrinos is out of the John Cusack movie. Utter idiocy, all of it, like the lava that could keep up steps with Cusack whether he walked, ran, drove, or flew!

[Cancer]

Hmm, sounds like I'd've walked out about ten minutes in, if they had managed to force me into a theatre in the first place.

[L. Marcus]

I think that the neutrinos were mentioned in the first minutes, and that the mutating of the same had caused the Earth's core to heat up and thus set off the entire chain of events.

[Cancer]

... almost as plausible as "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?!?" but the latter was intended to be a manifestation of extreme ignorance.

[L. Marcus]

It's pretty much par for the course for Emmerich's movies.

[Old Man]

5 hours ago, Cancer said:

Hmm, sounds like I'd've walked out about ten minutes in, if they had managed to force me into a theatre in the first place.

 

If I walked out of every movie that had inaccurate hacking in it I'd never see a movie.

[Cancer]

So? Have the courage of your convictions, man!

[Cancer]

Long preamble here.

 

The administrative unit in which I have the Associate Director title got moved out of one building last spring (that one was subsequently demolished and the spot is being built on now), and into another one.  The current location is a building that is older than the building that was demolished.

 

In this older building/new location, the only men's restroom is on the third floor (the only women's restroom is on the second floor).  Yes, classes are held in this building (which has three floors), and things get pretty congested during passing periods.

 

So ... unless it is pouring down rain, when my morning coffee demands liberation, rather than go upstairs, it is more convenient for me to duck outside and walk into another building right across the way, where there is a less-used men's room right near the entry on that entry level.  That other building houses the Business School.

 

I realized today that what I am doing is ... using the Business School as my outhouse.

 

After some consideration ... as a member of the College of Science & Engineering, I am oddly OK with that.