I recently was in a situation where I realized my theoretical physics knowledge was subtly working against me, in a real-world situation.
Let me begin by saying I've been having really bad luck with tires recently. Maybe it's because I drive about 2 hours each weekend to visit my fiance, and it adds an unusual amount of wear and tear on my tires, I don't know. What I do know is that in the past year or two, I've been forced to replace a tire 4-5 times. It was only a few weeks ago, when I got a flat and had to replace the most recent 2 tires that it was apparent enough for the particular repair place I was near to tell me this is NOT due to running over something on the road, etc. In short, the tire was just destroyed from the inside out, probably due to improper pressure in the tires. I had been driving on under-inflated tires, probably for quite some time.
Under-inflated? I didn't get it. Aren't tires air-tight? Where would the air go, if it's a closed system. Now, I'm the first to admit I'm a car idiot. My mechanic knowledge goes about as far as adding oil, adding gas, and replacing a flat tire with a spare (I've gotten REALLY good at that part in recent years, in fact). So when I asked the mechanic how often I should be checking the pressure of my tires, myself, he suggested once a month.
Once a month. So slightly more often than "check the pressure, how do you do that?"
Needless to say, I bought a pressure reader display thingy and as soon as I got home from the mechanic, I checked the pressure on my tires. The two they replaced were exactly what the label on the tire said it should be, 44 PSI. One of the back tires was at 35 PSI. The other back tire was at something like 22 PSI, nearly HALF deflated. I very promptly went to the nearest gas station and filled them with air to the correct pressure.
So apparently, tires are not a PERFECT, ideal system. Air can, in fact, leak out over time, so that a perfect 44 PSI tire today might not stay that way indefinitely.
Welcome to the world of masses with friction, springs with mass, and objects that are not perfect spheres. It's a scary place.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Two More Papers Brings the Total to 3.
It's been several months since my last post, but I assure you, my non-existent reader(s), that I am still alive and kicking. My girlfriend of several years is now my fiance. We've had the promise dinner thingy, and our families have met, and it all went very well. We are planning to get married after we get our respective degrees, sometime in summer '09. I'm still doing research at UCI steady as always. And in two weeks, I'm heading back to a family vacation in Yosemite which should be fun.
Speaking of research, in the past month or so, I've had two more papers come out onto astro-ph, the online journal cite that pretty much the entire astronomy community posts to.
Berrier et al 2008 (papers with > 3 authors are generally referred to by the first author's name "et al" and the year) can be found here. I'm the 2nd author on this paper, and it's been a long time coming. The 1-sentence summary is that galaxies residing today in big clusters of galaxies tend to fall in to the cluster alone, not in small groups of a few galaxies at a time.
Cooke et al 2008 can be found here. I'm 4th author on this one, because mostly I just provided some theoretical comparison that the first author used in 1-2 paragraphs of the paper. This paper has actually gotten a bit of more mainstream media attention, because the main result can be "packaged" in a layman-friendly way. In this paper, we discovered a cluster of galaxies in a very early part of its formation, roughly 11.4 billion light years away, which is the farthest away scientists have ever discovered a merging group of galaxies (instead of just a single bright galaxy. It's very hard to distinguish a source into components so far away.) A press release from sciencedaily.com can be found here.
Does it seem somewhat depressing that after 4 months of no posts, this is all the news I really have? I suppose some might consider my life boring, but I like it. It's not so much boring as it is... consistent. Now if I had a "McJob" that required me to stand around and do nothing all day, THAT would be boring, but my life involves a lot of brainpower. Unless I'm watching TV or something. Because sometimes you gotta give your brain a break now and then.
Speaking of research, in the past month or so, I've had two more papers come out onto astro-ph, the online journal cite that pretty much the entire astronomy community posts to.
Berrier et al 2008 (papers with > 3 authors are generally referred to by the first author's name "et al" and the year) can be found here. I'm the 2nd author on this paper, and it's been a long time coming. The 1-sentence summary is that galaxies residing today in big clusters of galaxies tend to fall in to the cluster alone, not in small groups of a few galaxies at a time.
Cooke et al 2008 can be found here. I'm 4th author on this one, because mostly I just provided some theoretical comparison that the first author used in 1-2 paragraphs of the paper. This paper has actually gotten a bit of more mainstream media attention, because the main result can be "packaged" in a layman-friendly way. In this paper, we discovered a cluster of galaxies in a very early part of its formation, roughly 11.4 billion light years away, which is the farthest away scientists have ever discovered a merging group of galaxies (instead of just a single bright galaxy. It's very hard to distinguish a source into components so far away.) A press release from sciencedaily.com can be found here.
Does it seem somewhat depressing that after 4 months of no posts, this is all the news I really have? I suppose some might consider my life boring, but I like it. It's not so much boring as it is... consistent. Now if I had a "McJob" that required me to stand around and do nothing all day, THAT would be boring, but my life involves a lot of brainpower. Unless I'm watching TV or something. Because sometimes you gotta give your brain a break now and then.
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