Best Picture

1. 127 Hours
2. Black Swan
3. The Fighter
4. The Ghost Writer — Dark Horse!
5. Inception
6. The Kids Are All Right
7. The King’s Speech
8. The Social Network
9. Toy Story 3
10. True Grit

Best Director

1. Ben Affleck (The Town) — Shocker!
2. Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan)
3. David Fincher (The Social Network)
4. Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech)
5. Christopher Nolan (Inception)

Best Actor

1. Jeff Bridges (True Grit)
2. Robert Duvall (Get Low)
3. Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network)
4. Colin Firth (The King’s Speech)
5. James Franco (127 Hours)

Best Actress

1. Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right)
2. Natalie Portman (Black Swan)
3. Noomi Rapace (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) — Maybe?
4. Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit)
5. Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine)

Best Supp. Actor

1. Christian Bale (The Fighter)
2. Matt Damon (True Grit)
3. Andrew Garfield (The Social Network)
4. Jeremy Renner (The Town)
5. Geoffrey Rush (The King’s Speech)

Best Supp. Actress

1. Amy Adams (The Fighter)
2. Helena Bonham Carter (The King’s Speech)
3. Barbara Hershey (Black Swan) — Ooooh, take that Mila!
4. Melissa Leo (The Fighter)
5. Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom) — Heard about her on NPR this morning

First, however, some background. I’m a chemist (or used to be one), so I’m a super nerd when it comes to relativistic chemistry. It turns out that as elements get heavier, relativity becomes more and more important. As a theoretical chemist, one thing you learn quickly is that if you don’t take relativity into account, your calculation will be way off.

Without relativity, for example, my thesis work on IBr- had to take into account relativity. Iodine is a heavy element so relativity is important, so, I had to consider it. I did this the easy way: I let others take care of it! I used what’s called an ECP that sort of built in the relativity without my needing to worry.

I can hear you saying: so what, IBr isn’t that important and I’ve never heard of it. But, let’s say you want to calculate the what color gold metal should be or what mercury should be like at room temperature. Without relativity, gold looks like silver and mercury is a solid. With relativity, gold is gold and mercury is a liquid.

So now to the main event: why your car battery only works because of relativity. Couple  weeks ago, a paper came out in Physical Review Letters (PRL, 106, 018301 (2011) if you have access to it) by Pekka Pyykkö and collaborators called “Relativity and the Lead-Acid Battery”.  This paper uses relativistic quantum chemistry to model the reactions in a lead-acid battery (like the 12V battery in your car) and it found something rather amazing. Of the voltage generated by a lead-acid cell, which is ~2.1 V (there are 6 cells in a 12 V car battery), fully 1.7-1.8 V is due to relativistic effects. 80-85% of the voltage in a car battery is there because of relativity!

As the authors note in the paper, while the lead-acid cell has been known for 150 years, this paper is the first doing ab initio, or first principles, calculations, compared to the more modern lithium-ion cells of which ab initio calculations abound. The major reason for this is that lead is heavy and a heavy atom is a hard atom to calculate.

(They also show that without relativity, it’d make for a crap battery. They do calculations with lead’s lighter brother tin and find that a tin-acid battery wouldn’t be worth it’s weight in, well, tin.)

I just love it when something I studied, I’ve used, I know about has such a cool result like this.

Yours in NERD!,

Matt

You see, in my nearby IKEA store, you do the whole maze upstairs, then venture downstairs to the smaller-stuff section (kitchen gadgets, pillows, vases, light bulbs, &c.), pass through the flat-pack storage area and get to the checkout registers. So far, so good. But, then, just beyond the registers, you see the little grocery area with the meatballs, the lingonberry preserves, all sorts of yummy food.

After the registers.

So how exactly am I supposed to buy, say, a fancy napkin holder and some meatballs?  Do I buy the holder, grab some meatballs, and then get back in line to check out again? This seems to offend my sense of efficiency.

Or, is there some place to stash my holder before I check out, then get the meatballs, and then checkout? This seems smarter to me because it’s just one trip through the register.

Oh, and I know one answer is: buy the food at the register in the food area. Guess what? In the 10-15 times I’ve been to IKEA the last few years, that grocery register has never been manned. Never ever never ever. I think it’s actually an art installation I don’t get.

Yours in still confused,

Matt

Namely, I’m annoyed by my dryer’s dial which has a setting for “More Dry” and “Less Dry”. Wha? How can clothes be more or less dry? I washed them, they are wet; I dry them, they are dry. If something is less dry, it is wet. If something is more dry, it’s dry.

Am I just nuts here?

Yours in confused,

Matt

So, I said yes and was seated next to the apheresis machine and, after much whining and cowardice on the author’s part, I am now two red blood cell units down. Eep. All in all, not a bad experience for two reasons. One, I decided to use my right arm this time. Sure, it’s my dominant arm, so it’s annoying to be bandaged up right now, but it also has a beautiful vein.  The second reason was the amazing Ama (perhaps Amma?). She was my vampire today and she was patient with scaredy-cat Matt and just great all around. And, I got a cool sticker:

After that, did some errands, hit the library, and got some Ethiopian. Figured some lentils and collard greens would help restore some lost iron (which I need to do).

I woke up this morning at 5 am, got down to the Basin around 6:30 am…and it was crowded!  Looks like I wasn’t the only one thinking of this.  I finally left around 9:30 so I got in a good 3-hour, 5-mile walk.  Wow, 0.6 mph. BLISTERING SPEED!

Hmm…ya know, getting up voluntarily at 5 am on a Saturday…gee…why *am* I single?

Hall and Oates. “Private Eyes”

Why? Find out below the cut…

So, why is “Private Eyes” so dangerous? First have a listen…

Now, when they got to the chorus singing:

Private Eyes

They’re watching you

They see your every move

you tell me, when you were singing along (and you were, admit it), did you sing that or did you sing:

Private Eyes *CLAP*

They’re watching you *CLAP CLAP*

They see your every move

Yep. You clapped. Now, think about driving along the Capital Beltway at the speed limit (never more!) and that chorus comes along. It’s impossible not to clap!

Dangerous.

I hope everyone likes them…because they are staying! (Read, pricey.)

I know, I know, not that exciting, but, man, is it fascinating! The object of my focus this afternoon is the LA Public Library’s online Menu Collection. Just give it a whirl and I dare you not to be sucked in.  Marvel at what ten bucks would buy you 30 years ago compared to today.

I’m not the first to find this site, but I’m damn sure not going to be the last!

However, there is a bit of an issue with its integration, I believe. Namely: they give different answers!  I know this because I tried out an example in the first link up there, that of 2^2^2^2^2.  It turns out the answer to this is a bit vague, so differing solutions are not unexpected, but still…

Why? Exponentiation is not associative, unlike addition or multiplication (it might satisfy the Lie algebra equivalent of the Jacobi identity, I dunno), so the order matters. A lot.  Thus, while 2+(3+4) = (2+3)+4, and likewise for multiplication, 2^(3^4) !=  (2^3)^4. This being exponentiation, it really doesn’t. The latter is 4096, the former is 2417851639229258349412352. Juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust a bit different. So without parentheses, things are vague.

Now how about the example in the article? We’ll get to that. Let’s start with 3 2′s. (2^2)^2 = 16, 2^(2^2) = 16. Phew safe. So, 2^2^2 is fine.

2^2^2^2? Given that, Bing outputs the “bottom-up” answer: ((2^2)^2)^2 = 256. W|A outputs the “top-down”: 2^(2^(2^2)) = 65536. Ah ha.

The disparity is growing, but not bad. So adding one more ^2 shouldn’t be too horrible, right?

Wrong.

Exponentiation grows quickly so order reaaaaaallly matters.

2^2^2^2^2? As expected from above, Bing should do 256^2=65536 and it does. W|A? Well, it does 2^65536. This is a big number. How big? Well…

20035299304068464649790723515

602557504478254755697514192650

169737108940595563114530895061

308809333481010382343429072631

818229493821188126688695063647…

…8091458852699826141425030123391

That is a 19729 digit number. Big.

Therein lies the difference, but which is right? Hmm. Most mathematicians think of repeated exponentiation as “top-down”. So, my main question is why isn’t Bing using W|A as it says? Or is there some extra option I need to assemble?

Oh well. Just an odd thing I noticed.