A muon m is a lepton with mass of 105MeV

It is possible to replace one of the electron in an atom by a negative muon.
[Scary-looking equations go here.]

Therefore muonic orbits much closer to nucleus

Since the muon (mu) mass is 206.77 times larger than the electron (me) mass,the atomic radius of muonic systems is approximately 200 times smaller than the H atom bohr radius.Since mu/mp~ 0.1,where mp is a proton mass, considerable isotope effects are expected to occur in muonic molecules.The lifetime of the muon is ~ 2 ns,which is much longer than current intense laser pulse durations,thus allowing in principle a possibility to manipulate muonic systems by superintense (I> 10 **20 W/cm2) lasers. Such high intensities are required since the ionization potentials are consequently 200 times larger than H and the muonic unit of laser intensity becomes 200**4 times larger than the atomic unit Io= 3.5 x 10 **16 W/cm2.The corresponding muonic time unit is 200 times shorter than the atomic one (24 attoseconds),ie 120 zeptoseconds. We derive scaling rules for the behavior of muonic atoms and molecules exposed to superintense laser fields using quasistatic models of tunnelling ionization and dissociaition akin to our previous work on H2+ in intense laser fields, ( Phys Rev Lett 84,3562(2000), Phys Rev A 63,,023409 (2001)). Ionization and dissociation rates for the muonic systems, ppu,ddu,ttu,will be presented for currently available superintense (I~10**22 W/cm2) 800 nm laser pulses in order to discuss manipulation scenarios such as laser induced recollision at such ultrahigh intensities where proton ponderomotive energies of 1 MeV can be now created.

But anyway: Smaller atoms! Coming soon to a store near you! But you have to act fast.

Update: This is why my lab exploded. Well, that and three hundred cases of Jolt Cola on a hot summer day...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 325 words, total size 2 kb.

Where was I? DVDs, burn, right! So I bought a hundred blank DVD-Rs, which are conveniently white on one side so that they can be printed on and you can tell which way up they go.*

So, I have a hundred DVDs, which I am working my way through rapidly. I'll probably be buying another hundred before I'm done.

I have a hundred, will have two hundred... Identical disks, white on one side, silver on the other. Oops.

Labels would be good. I could buy some CD labels, print them out, peel them off, stick them on, hope I don't screw it up. Or I could get a printer that prints right on the DVD! Epson sell two models that do this, the Photo Stylus 900 and 960. They look like nice little printers in general, and they're not too expensive (particularly the 900).

But. Not. In. Australia.

Which. Just. Happens. To. Be. Where. I. Live.

In America, yes. In Canada, too. In Britain, in Denmark, in the Philippines, in Singapore.

But not here, dammit. I've emailed Epson; it will be interesting to see how (and if) they respond.

* No, really. Cheap CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are sometimes featureless silver on both sides, and the only way you can tell which way up they go is by studying the diffraction patterns. Or by sticking the disk in the drive and seeing what happens, which is often more reliable.

Update: Epson responded this morning. Good for them.

Apparently the reason the 900 and 960 are not available in Australia is that they use dye-based inks (the email actually said "die", but never mind) rather than pigment-based inks. The pigment-based inks are water-fast (which means that they won't run), but the dye-based inks are not.

Epson helpfully pointed me to the Stylus Photo 2100, which is available in Australia (which I knew) and can print on CDs and DVDs (which I didn't know). It's a very nice printer, 2880x1440 dpi, 7 colours with individual ink cartridges, able to print on paper up to A3+ size with edge-to-edge coverage (no borders). It has parallel and USB and Firewire ports. (I like Firewire.)

It costs $1789.

Yowie.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:25 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 480 words, total size 3 kb.

I've served on a jury, for example, and I was impressed by the common-sense, level-headed approach taken by the other 11 members. (I was just there for the free sandwiches.) It was not a case that - as far as I know - any of us had had to deal with before, but we listened to the evidence, took notes, and came fairly quickly to a unanimous verdict.

Get a few guys together and they can talk about cars - or computers, depending on the generation - for just about any length of time without the least sign of animosity. Even sport, with its strong team rivalries, is usually a safe topic.

As soon as the subject of politics is raised, though, the debate becomes heated, and almost invariably devolves rapidly into yelling and swearing. Unless everyone in the room happens to barrack* for the same team.

I have a theory as to why this is so, and it is this:

People don't know what they are talking about.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work. Consider the family. The family is, in essence, pure socialism. Mum** and Dad earn the money, and it gets spent where it's needed. Centralised planning, from each according to etc etc. This works because it is a family, and everyone has everyone else's best interests at heart.***

Obviously a good thing, right? But when you try to scale it up to running an entire country, you end up with millions of people dead.

When you try to scale a process, things change. Talk to an industrial chemist about it sometime.**** Factors that might be insignificant on the small scale come to the fore. Those same factors were present in your small scale experiment, but they scale differently - some might grow linearly with N (the size of the group), but others might grow as Log(N), or as N² - or even as something scary like 2^N or N!, though such things grow so fast that theories affected by such scaling tend to get wrecked by ugly fact pretty quickly. The factors of accountability and greed and the costs of centralisation and information flow were all there in the family, but with a group that size they didn't matter. With a hundred million people, they predominate.

What it boils down to is that most people have no idea about how to run a country, because they never have run a country. And because it's complicated, and it is not at all obvious how the scaling rules apply to even one element, let alone the huge number of disparate and conflicting elements needed to make a country run successfully.

Which is why even the people who do have this experience mostly just muddle along, making small changes and hoping they don't screw things up too badly.*****

I have a cure for this. If I get it right, it might even make me rich... If I ever get time to actually work on it.

* Root, but Australians attach another meaning to that term.
** Yes, Jen, hee hee.
*** It works in my family, anyway. No, I don't want to hear about your family.
**** But don't blame me when you can't get him to stop talking.
***** And relying on the scientists and engineers to drive economic growth and generally improve things.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:13 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 640 words, total size 4 kb.

Die, varmints! Die!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:44 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 43 words, total size 1 kb.

I'm talking, of course, about the anchovy.

What I'm planning to do (as soon as my friendly Nigerian financier comes through with the cash) is strike out in a bold new direction: pygmy shrew farming. Of course, we won't call them pygmy shrews, as our marketing test group rated that as the second least tasty-sounding animal, right after the leaf-nosed bat and just before the bandicoot.

No, in honour of their farm-raised heritage, I'm going to call them ranchovies. Get your pizza with 100% organic free range ranchovies today!

As for the shrews? It's gotta be better than the way they live now.

* Due to the French.
** After, for example, fried octopus.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:11 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 138 words, total size 1 kb.

Update: Rats, he's fixed it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:45 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 52 words, total size 1 kb.

Has this unassuming man in a rumpled sports shirt lifted the lid on a boiling caldron of anti-Bush fury in liberal precincts across America? Or is he just an overcaffeinated, irrational liberal, venting to a minority of like-minded readers?

Ramesh Ponnuru, a soft-spoken conservative at National Review, pays Chait a backhanded compliment, writing that "not everyone would be brave enough to recount their harrowing descent into madness so vividly."

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:24 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 86 words, total size 1 kb.

I expect Hosting Matters are suffering another DDoS attack. I hate Microsoft.*

* This is not in fact a complete non-sequitur, as most of the machines used to launch DDoS attacks are Windows boxes that have been hacked.

Update: Back again. Maybe it was just a glitch.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:26 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 77 words, total size 1 kb.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:48 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 28 words, total size 1 kb.

Way to go, Daniel.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:41 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 25 words, total size 1 kb.