Relativity, Here We Come!

Happy Birthday Mr. President

Happy birthday President Obama. I may not always agree with your policies, but I do hope you have a happy and healthy year.

Google CEO Steps Down from Apple Board of Directors

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has stepped down from the board of directors at Apple. The basic reason being given is that as Google begins to compete more and more with Apple, Schmidt will be forced to recuse himself from more and more meetings of the board at Apple. So it is now practical to have him on the board anymore. It never seemed to make sense to have him on the board, so this is probably a good choice for everyone.

Resetting your Sleep Clock

While our vacation this year stayed exclusively in Eastern Standard Time, I know that a number of Mod-Bloggers have to switch between time zones as they visit friends and family. So, they may be interested to learn about a new study which claims it is possible to reset your sleep clock in a single night. What is the secret? Fasting!

Simply stop eating during the 12-16 hour period before you want to be awake. Once you start eating again, your internal clock will be reset as though it is the start of a new day. Your body will consider the time you break your fast as your new "morning."

For example, if you want to start waking up at 2:00 am, you should start fasting between 10:00 am or 2:00 pm the previous day, and don't break your fast until you wake up at 2:00 am. Make sure you eat a nice healthy meal to jumpstart your system.

This could be invaluable to frequent travelers, and infrequent travelers with a desperate need to stay awake at a wedding. :-)

Irony vs Critics of Universal Health Care

While I tend to lean Right, we here at Mod-Blog try to show both sides of the argument. So, I was glad to find this comic which I think does a pretty good job of using humor (irony) to show the fallacies of some of the knee-jerk arguments from the right wing. That is not say I agree with it, of course. :-)

The Nomad's Wanderings

The Nomad has been wandering in southern New Jersey for the last week, but returns to his home tent today. If you'd like to browse some of the photos from his travels, click on the image below.

The Electron has been Split!

If you ask a modern quantum physicist, he or she will tell you that there are two indivisible kinds of particles - quarks and electrons. Get anywhere smaller than these two particles and you're into a energy soup defined by E=mC^2 that Einstein talked about. An electron, we were always taught, is a "fundamental" particle.

Turns out, it is not so fundamental.

A team from the Universities of Cambridge and Birmingham have successfully split the electron into two separate particles - one which holds the electron's charge and one which holds its magnetic spin. They have been named holons and spinons. The split only occurs when electrons are forced into tight proximity that overcomes their natural electromagnetic repulsion.

This has the potential to transform how we see the world around us, and could have huge implications for quantum computing and nanoscale technologies.