Resistance is for the Birds

Damn right. #resist

👊 pic.twitter.com/8QQ2UCN1pT

— Scott Kerr (@scott_kerr) April 17, 2018

"How Irish Falconry Changed Language"

This very cool article describes a transition of several words "from medieval falconry to modern English" (with William Shakespeare as intermediary and interpreter).

Is A Chicken a Dirac Limit of a Dinosaur?

This paper has a lovely line in its concluding section: "In such a cartoon description, a chicken is a Dirac limit of a tyrannosaur, in which many of its genetic parameters tend to zero."

(Tip of the cap to Lior Pachter.)

A Colorful Bird

Here is a gorgeous, very colorful bird.

(Tip of the cap to IFLS.)

Twitter User @MrSnuffleupagus Follows Exactly One User: @BigBird

Twitter user @MrSnuffleupagus follows exactly one user: @BigBird.

Now that's a great new-school twist on something old-school!

(Tip of the cap to Gregory Fricke​ for the article that led me to the above factoid.)

Birds on a Wire

On the taxi ride to the airport, I saw a set of three power lines that were parallel to each other and arrayed vertically.

The bottom one had 1 bird perched on it, the middle one has 3 perched birds, and the top one had a large number of birds on it (too many for me to count).

Any ideas what the mechanism is for this? Is there a preference for height? Does it have a bit of a DLA-like flavor in that a bird lands on the first available wire from something like a random walk or Levy flight such that it's more likely to "stick" on the top one? Does anybody know if somebody has tried to model this?

Also: Mine.

Hummingbirds in a Wind Tunnel

IFLS has posted an article about hummingbird flight, that includes a really cool video---including of how they adapt to being in a wind tunnel. Very cool!

"Bird Flocks Shatter on Impact"

Research shows (technically, "suggests") that bird flocks shatter on impact. That is all.

(By the way, the reason it is "suggests" is because these are numerical simulations.)

(Tip of the cap to whoever posts for Physics Today on Facebook.)

Irony: Part N

I suppose I ought to appreciate the irony of several birds dive-bombing me while I am marking ballistics problems on my students' dynamics homework.

(But, really, I am annoyed that I now need to wash my jacket and take a bath. The first bird already forced that, but after the second and the positive feedback loop that might be occurring, I just needed to escape inside.)

I ought to design a homework problem based on this, though...

For the Birds

Here is the straight line (you provide the punchline): Apparently, scientists at the £3.6bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC) found their plans to emulate the big bang postponed this week when a passing bird dropped a "bit of baguette" into the machine, causing it to overheat. Awesome!

(Tip of the cap to Heidi Eldenburg Bramlet, although I took the liberty to use a news source other than Fox News for personal reasons.)

A few notes on "awesomeness" (plus a little bit of awesomeness)

Here are a few "awesome" things from yesterday. (I wanted to post them yesterday, but I was busy helping to make ping pong shirts.)

Well, one of them is that my Screamer arrived on Monday. I set it up in the entry room in Sloan Annex. The building's residents just assumed I was the one responsible, so I obviously have the right kind of reputation. Also, Mike Cross is teaching Phys 106, so all the students picking up or turning in homework assignments or exams will be seeing the Screamer every time they do so. (Mike has now officially sanctioned this.) A couple of amusing picture ideas got thrown around yesterday: An 'I love this #%!$ing school' shirt and other Caltech memorabilia will be worn, beer mugs will be held, and at least one person broached the subject of being somewhat tipsy (which apparently only takes half a beer) for the picture. OK, so only two of us were discussing this while we were both avoiding work (yeah, flicking), but if done correctly, I forsee an extremely awesome picture.

Yesterday, I had a work meeting with the prof with whom I'm collaborating on the solitary-wave-through-beads project. This was right before a faculty meeting in which people were slated to officially approve the choice of this guy for the Applied & Computational Math department (with an IST affiliation). My collaborator told me about the meeting and I asked who was decided up. She mentioned the name, so I googled the guy. Check out the picture on his professional web page. It's "awesome." As I told my collaborator, his picture looks like he's trying to get a date, so we had some fun mocking him (keeping in mind that she was going to go cast her vote on him in a faculty meeting in a couple of minutes... so this was all really tactful).

Also during the meeting, something fell out of my hair that apparently had fallen in there during lunch time. I need a haircut really badly right now, and this whole thing reminded me of a comment Wendell made many years ago (when my hair was similarly long or even longer) that I shouldn't cut my hair because the family of birds living there would have to find a new nest. The thing falling out of my hair was simultaneously embarrassing and amusing. I told my collaborator to pretend it didn't happen. She agreed to do this as long as I also pretended she hadn't laughed at me hysterically. Clearly, it's a win-win situation. (Hmmm... I almost made a "Wendell" tag because of this paragraph.)