From a (positive) review of the final issue of Lucifer:
Vertigo have released countless Sandman spin-offs over the years, of which this is just one. The numbers have dwindled recently, but back in the day you couldn’t move for stories featuring a minor character who had three lines of dialogue in Sandman #17, usually discovering the exciting world of lesbianism and tarot. Most of them were, shall we say, less than memorable.
Sad, but true.
If you’ve read any SF or fantasy (or, god forbid, fanfic), you’ve undoubtedly run across Mary Sue, even if you don’t recognize “her”.
Anyhow, here’s a hilarious parody of Sues and the lamers who foist them on us.
Actor Gary Lockwood has the distinction of being “killed” by two of the more iconic characters in SciFi — Captain James T. Kirk and HAL9000.
(Now if only we had the chance to see Kirk and HAL9000 face off directly…)
This might be a first — the appearance of (which is clearly supposed to be) Thevenin and Norton equivalents in a mainstream comic strip.
Take a look.
He’s even right. A circuit of sources and resistors with only two external terminals can be collapsed down down to two forms, all three of which will yield identical results when you take measurements from those terminals.
The key measurements are the open-circuit voltage (Voc) across the terminals and the short-circuit current (Isc) through the terminals. From those you calculate the Thevenin resistance RT = Voc/Isc.
The Thevenin form is an ideal voltage source of Voc in series with RT with the external terminals being connected to the “free” end of RT and the “free” end of the voltage source. The Norton form is an ideal current source of Isc in parallel with RT and the external terminals being connected across RT.
So indeed, even when nothing is connected to the terminals, the Norton form will be pumping current through the resistor while the Thevenin form will be quiescent. So Alex is quite right that the Norton form will be warmer.
Hint: if you’re a fugitive Mafiosi, consider a laptop and GPG. Or at least a one-time pad.
Supposedly there’s going to be a Star Trek XI coming out in 2008, which will focus on the TOS characters’ early years. I love the concept, but am worried about the execution. I’d love to see them hire Peter David to write the script.
Tamagotchi are back. And they can communicate with each other. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Tyler Cowen has a neat post about pennies behaving as call options on zinc/copper.
Here’s something pretty cool…
Put a particle into an excited state. Then in a time very short compared to the lifetime of the excited state (i.e. so the probability of having decayed back to the ground state is very, very low) check to see if the particle is still in the excited state. This will collapse the wavefunction and (almost always, because you picked the timing that way) guarantee the particle is in the excited state. Rinse, lather, repeat, and you can keep the particle in the excited state indefinitely.
But what’s really cool is that you don’t have to do an active test (i.e. see if the particle is in the excited state) — a passive test works just as well. For example, you can send in a photon that can only be absorbed if the particle is in the ground state.
So you can basically keep the particle in the excited state by doing almost literally nothing — after all, in theory you could use photons that you were planning to use for something else. And since almost none of them will ever be absorbed, you can still use the photons for whatever else you were doing, but with the side-effect of keeping the particle excited.
Pretty neat.
