Or, my official “this journal is not yet moribund” post. Err, well, you be the judge.

• The U.S. Energy Dept. is taking another look at Cold Fusion [via Slashdot].

  Ah, cold fusion. The field of inquiry that is predicated on the belief that chemical reactions of ~5 eV can affect the threshold energies of reactions that require 50,000 eV or more. Of course, this being Slashdot, it wasn’t too hard to find a conspiracy theorist or two modded up. Actually, if you want a better conspiracy theory, physicist Chad Orzel has one for you: if the DOE is thinking about funding cold fusion research, that enables the administration to say that they are “researching alternative energy sources” without, actually, like, researching any alternative energy sources. I wouldn’t listen to Orzel though; as he himself admits, he’s just a nutbar conspiracy theorist.

• Well, forget about cold fusion. If you’re jonesin’ for some real physics (and who isn’t?), one need look no further than Britney Spears’s Guide to Semiconductor Physics.

  “It is a little known fact that Ms Spears is an expert in semiconductor physics. Not content with just singing and acting, in the following pages, she will guide you in the fundamentals of the vital laser components that have made it possible to hear her super music in a digital format.”

  It actually looks to be a pretty informative introduction to semiconductor physics,^[1] although high school or college students looking for term paper material should note that it is probably not a good idea to list this reference explicitly in your bibliography. Just lie and say it came from the IEEE. You should also probably avoid cribbing this illustration of the conduction and valence bands.

• And speaking of the IEEE, they have another article that takes a look at music encoding algorithms [also via Slashdot]. “At its heart, the MP3 format uses an algorithm that takes the data contained in CD music relating loudness to specific points in time and transforms it instead into data relating loudness to specific frequencies.” When I first read this, I thought, “This is the IEEE and they can’t bring themselves to say ‘Fourier Transform’?” Then I started googling, and discovered you don’t necessarily have to use FFT to do the encoding. You can come up with whatever algorithm you like, and you can even charge people for it if you like. How ’bout that, you learn something new on the Intarweb every day.

  Now, if I was going to write an MP3 encoder, I would use a Laplace Transform. If you think that’s perverse, I apologize… I can’t help it, it’s the way I was brought up.

• I saw a bumper sticker yesterday, “Bush is a Muggle.” At first I thought, well, of course he’s a Muggle, we’re all Muggles in the strict sense of the definition. Then I thought, maybe that was the bumper sticker’s point? Maybe it’s a very subtle pro-Bush bumper sticker?

  1. Bush is a Muggle.
  2. I’m a Muggle, you’re a Muggle.
  3. We’re all just happy Muggles together. Revel in our common Muggle-osity!
  4. …

  Then I thought, I’m thinking a little too hard about this.

Time to go make the mint syrup for the mojitos for today’s barbeque. It’s a quadruple batch, Yum!

1. Not only informative, but entertaining as well:

Note that in this technical region [temperature range] if the counter doping is negligible, N_a << N_d or N_d << N_a, (35) and (37) simplify to

n = N_d (39)

p = N_a (40)

which is what we tell the engineers.