[QUOTE=xilman;384986]That's a lie! Only one of them (bloomers) was previously not known to me as an eponym.[/QUOTE]

I confess most of these were shockingly new to me, but it seems I'm a [strike]dumbass[/strike] follower of the late Mr. Scotus who figures into #8.

Now that the initial shock has subsided somewhat, my comments and questions:

1. saxophone - So shouldn't it be the Adolphone? (And is Adolphe's brother Goldman the on who founded the eponymous investment bank?)

2. nicotine - Makes sense that this is named after a Frenchman, that is also what is predicted by the branch of mathematics known as Galoises theory.

3. bloomers - And knickers are named after the famous NYC basketball franchise, yes?

4. mausoleum - I thought it was after the folks who made those "Corn - we call it maize" [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuOlD0JZhM4"]cooking-oil and margarine TV commercials[/url], a kind of "bury my heart-clogging fats at Wounded Knee" ad theme. Shows you how much I know.

5. chauvinism - Another predictable "Of course ahm Fransh - why do you theenk I have thees outrrrrrrrrrageous acc-ent?" import. Note that the UK equivalent, jingoism, is confusingly named after a German, John Jacob Jingoheimerschmidt. I think it's a Hanoverian-dynastic thing.

6. Cyrillic - Ah, wrong again. (I had always thought "Cyrillic" was the Russian for "It's Greek to me, comrade").

7. lynching - I just hope this doesn't mean I'm gonna have to stop drinking Jack Daniel's out of moral principle. Please tell me the -burg is named after a different Lynch...

8. dunce cap - Speaking of lazy pupils, my ophthalmologist (derived from the name of Ophthalmus, a famous Greek seer who lived around 2500 BC) told me I have a case of those recently, but he prescribed eye exercises and some medicinal drops, pointy-cap-wearing didn't figure into it. Is he ripping me off by prescribing substandard care? If hat-wearing is an important part of the cure, I want to know.

9. fuchsia - Ah, I thought this was some kind of bizarre anti-honor for Klaus Fuchs, the (in)famous Manhattan Project leaker. So this means I can actually wear this color wihout being accused of being a crypto-commie? That would be cool.

10. Uzi - Yowzers. I though it was Hebrew for "Kalashniknov".

11. gardenia - Not your garden-variety eponym here. Oh wait...

12. braille - On the hearing-challenged side of the ledger, ASL is not an initialism for "American Sign Language" as commonly assumed, but rather is in honor of the late Turkish Dr. Aslan Canuhearmenowoglu, a famous 19th-century worker-with-deaf-children.

13. diesel - Not after Vin? C'mon, you're pulling mein Bein!

14. macadam - Wrong, wrong, wrong, it's because the stones in the mix look like the eponymous - and very expensive - nuts. Next they'll be telling us "tarmac" is short for "tar macadam". Pull the other one, guys!

15. bougainvillea - Not after the S. Pacific island? Dagnabbit, I really thought I had that one right, too.

[QUOTE=only_human;384992][URL="http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2014/oct/09/are-weak-values-quantum-after-all"]Are 'weak values' quantum after all?[/URL][/QUOTE]

Interesting - But doesn't the whole notion of QM weak measurements contradict the uncertainty principle to begin with? (That would have been enough to render it extremely dubious in my book, but OTOH I have great respect for the work of the likes of Aharonov and his longtime collaborator Bohm.)

[QUOTE=ewmayer;385140]Interesting - But doesn't the whole notion of QM weak measurements contradict the uncertainty principle to begin with? (That would have been enough to render it extremely dubious in my book, but OTOH I have great respect for the work of the likes of Aharonov and his longtime collaborator Bohm.)[/QUOTE]Dunno, even if I had a wheelhouse, my opinion would be outside [I]that[/I] and hanging out with Snoopy next door.

Physics World called a weak measurement experiment [I]Breakthrough of the Year[/I] in 2011:
[URL="http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2011/dec/16/physics-world-reveals-its-top-10-breakthroughs-for-2011"]Physics World reveals its top 10 breakthroughs for 2011[/URL][QUOTE]We have also awarded nine runners-up (see below). The choice between first and second place was particularly close this year because the number-two finding also involves weak measurement – this time to map the wavefunction of a bunch of photons. But we felt that Steinberg's finding edged it. Other breakthroughs in the list include the first "space–time" cloak, a laser made from a living cell and a new way to measure cosmic distances.

1st place: Shifting the morals of quantum measurement

Steinberg's work stood out because it challenges the widely held notion that quantum mechanics forbids us any knowledge of the paths taken by individual photons as they travel through two closely spaced slits to create an interference pattern.

This interference is exactly what one would expect if we think of light as an electromagnetic wave. But quantum mechanics also allows us to think of the light as photons – although with the weird consequence that if we determine which slit individual photons travel through, then the interference pattern vanishes. By using weak measurements Steinberg and his team have been able to gain some information about the paths taken by the photons without destroying the pattern.
In the experiment, the double slit is replaced by a beamsplitter and a pair of optical fibres. A single photon strikes the beamsplitter and travels along either the right or the left fibre. After emerging from the closely spaced ends of the parallel fibres, it creates an interference pattern on a detector screen.

The weak measurement is performed by passing the emerging photons through a piece of calcite, which imparts a tiny rotation in the polarization of the photon. The amount of rotation depends on the direction of travel of the photon – in other words, its momentum. The photons are then "post-selected" according to where they strike the screen, which allows the researchers to determine the average direction of travel of photons that arrive there.
The experiment reveals, for example, that a photon detected on the right-hand side of the diffraction pattern is more likely to have emerged from the optical fibre on the right than from the optical fibre on the left. While this knowledge is not forbidden by quantum mechanics, Steinberg says that physicists have been taught that "asking where a photon is before it is detected is somehow immoral".

"Little by little, people are asking forbidden questions," says Steinberg, who adds that his team's experiment will "push [physicists] to change how they think about things".

2nd place: Measuring the wavefunction

Second place goes to another group that has asked a "forbidden question". Led by Jeff Lundeen at the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa – a former colleague of Steinberg – a team has used weak measurement to map out the wavefunction of an ensemble of identical photons without actually destroying any of them. Quantum tomography, in contrast, maps out the wavefunction at the expense of destroying the state. As well as boosting our understanding of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, the technique could prove useful in cases where tomography cannot be used.[/QUOTE]

[B][SIZE=2]Ultra-fast charging batteries that can be 70% recharged in just two minutes[/SIZE][/B]

[URL]http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141013090449.htm[/URL]

I prefer this news:

[B][SIZE=3]Space-based methane maps find largest U.S. signal in Southwest[/SIZE][/B]


[url]http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141009163805.htm[/url]

PS( means cows and US citizens fart alot...hehehe)

I wonder what places like Nigeria and the northern reaches of Siberia look like on a methane map. In the first, oil exploiters are flaring off huge quantities of methane because it's not worth their trouble. Those flare zones are [U]really[/U] bright in night, visible light satellite photos. It seems pretty likely that a great deal of methane can escape unburned.

What I'd be looking for in Siberia is signs of methane plumes from thawing permafrost, or from methane clathrates in a warming ocean.

[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate[/url]

It is official. Today's [URL="http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/22/tech/innovation/partial-solar-eclipse/index.html"]solar eclipse[/URL] went almost completely unnoticed even by the people who could see it. ;-)

[QUOTE=Batalov;385903]It is official. Today's [URL="http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/22/tech/innovation/partial-solar-eclipse/index.html"]solar eclipse[/URL] went almost completely unnoticed even by the people who could see it. ;-)[/QUOTE]

Took the kids out and saw it with a pinhole projection. They thought it was pretty neat. Also if you looked at the sun, just for a split second, then looked away and closed your eyes, you could see the eclipse as an afterimage, even though the glimpse was too fast to see it. :smile:

You will be in a relatively good spot for the [URL="http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEgoogle/SEgoogle2001/SE2017Aug21Tgoogle.html"]2017 total eclipse[/URL].
I am thinking about combining a Yellowstone trip and seeing the total.

Saw the annular in 2012 in S/W corner of Utah (drove especially for that).

[QUOTE=Batalov;385941]Saw the annular in 2012 in S/W corner of Utah (drove especially for that).[/QUOTE]

I watched that one about 15 m west of [URL="https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.42815,-113.203943&spn=0.000705,0.00142&t=h&z=20&layer=c&cbll=37.428186,-113.203954&panoid=AivY2ids8yXBXXAWAZCx2A&cbp=12,264.65,,0,6.09"]this point.[/URL]

We spent a day at Bryce and then headed to where the NASA and NP people were setting a telescope with the projection of a giant image (into the inside of a U-Haul truck because it was too bright otherwise). This was [URL="https://www.google.com/maps/search/UT-63/@37.6678406,-112.1580561,3a,75y,13.84h,86.6t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sgs8wvY4RHYpYg-O5QBqZ7Q!2e0"]across from Ruby's Inn[/URL].