Quickthink

Rosie Schaap offers a charming review of Irish whiskeys in preparation for St. Paddy’s day. next week Rosie fancies Jamesons. Well, there is no harm there. But truth be told, I be a Bushmill man meself. And Rosie, bless her heart, left out my favorite luxury choice. That would be Connemara 12 year old.  Be that as it may, I hold no grudge and I have added a link to Rosie’s article to my Wine and Spirit Buzz page on the right.

Bottom’s up!

NYT does a lot of things well, and one of them is its “36 hours in … ” travel series. This week they do 36 hours in Tallinn with text, recommendations and photo montage. What fun! But what about Tartu?

More Friday Fun!

Lots of things happen at the nano-level that affect us. But we are not yet very good at dealing with them. Indeed, we only discovered the very tiny universe around us several hundred years ago. Louis Pasteur caused … errr … quite a stir back then. We thought we were rather clever we invented antibiotics. But only later did we realize that with mutations, germs can become resistant. And cancer? Well, it still buggers us most of the time. Ditto for those pesky microbes that cause bad odors.

But nano-technology may deliver something that will radically improve our ability to manage microbes. Sort of a seek and destroy type of nano-agent that can wipe out even resistant stuff. It is an interesting development and FC has the story.

Some Friday Fun

I have no idea how much 125 billion electron volts actually is. Indeed, I am a little vague on what an electron volt is at all. Wikipedia says

…  it is the amount of energy gained by the charge of a single electron moved across an electric potential difference of one volt. Thus it is 1 volt (1 joule per coulomb, 1 J/C) multiplied by the electron charge (1 e, or 1.602176565(35)×10⁻¹⁹ C). Therefore, one electron volt is equal to 1.602176565(35)×10⁻¹⁹ J.^[3]

That clears it up … somewhat. For us laymen, it may be more useful to know that

Historically, the electron volt was devised as a standard unit of measure through its usefulness in electrostatic particle accelerator sciences because a particle with charge q has an energy E=qV after passing through the potential V; if q is quoted in integer units of the elementary charge and the terminal bias in volts, one gets an energy in eV.

Did you get that?

Ok, so what is the big deal about 125 billion electron volts? It is the amount of unexplained energy generated in certain particle accelerations. It appeared more than once. And so, scientists think it may be the signature of that great unexplained thing that we call the Higgs Bosson. NYT reports.

Ah well, perhaps my son can explain this to me. If he has time.