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Signing off for 2005: Thank you, dear reader. December 31, 2005

Xeni Jardin:

Feliz AÃ±o Nuevo. Much gratitude to you for visiting our humble blog. I hope you”ll come back when the calendar strikes aught-six. Image: Maria Magdalena, shot inside a church in Antigua, Guatemala (2004 / Xeni).

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Bootleg copy of 2006 Hooters calendar

Xeni Jardin:
Link to scanned image. It”s totally worksafe. It”s a joke. (Thanks, Wayne Correia!)

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Bootleg copy of 2006 Hooters calendar

Xeni Jardin:
Link to scanned image. It”s totally worksafe. It”s a joke. (Thanks, Wayne Correia!)

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Moment of FSM zen: Pasta Club devotional fountain

Xeni Jardin:

An intrepid New York City photographer spotted this faith-based fountain in Central Park. It stands in tribute to the secret Pastafarian society known to acolytes as PASTA CLUB. Believe. Link (Thanks, Adam Fields!)

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How to break Silly Putty December 30, 2005

Mark Frauenfelder:
A couple of days ago I wrote about a Google employee who mashed together 250 lbs of Silly Putty and then had a hard time breaking it up into chunks.

Today Dr. Paul J. Camp, from the Department of Physics at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA emailed me to say:

“I guess they didn”t try smacking it with a hammer.

“Silly Putty is a bizarre polymer, but like most polymers it has a transition temperature at which its physical properties change. In this case, there is a glass transition temperature (Tg) — below Tg, the polymer will behave like a glass and shatter on impact instead of deforming. For example, PVC has a Tg of 83 C which makes it a reasonable choice for cold water pipes but not for hot water, which would cause it to flow like Silly Putty (addition of various plasticizers can adjust the Tg). However, often the viscoelastic properties of polymers have a rate dependence and this is the case for Silly Putty. Do the same amount of work over a much shorter time (smack it with a hammer instead of pulling) and the SP behaves as if its Tg has been raised. It then shatters into bits.

“You can read a mildly confusing scientific explanation here (from Case Western) along with pictures of Silly Putty subjected to the same force at different rates, or if you prefer a more visceral experience, watch the video from this experiment of what happens when you drop a 50 pound beach ball made of Silly Putty off the roof of a building.”

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Every #1 song ever to appear on Billboard Top 100 squashed into one long song

Mark Frauenfelder:
R. Luke DuBois has created an interesting piece of music out of the 857 songs that have appeared at the top of the charts in the Billboard Top 100 since 1958. The result, called “Billboard,” is 37 minutes long.

Billboard allows you to get a birds-eye view of the Billboard Hot 100 by listening to all the #1 singles from 1958 through the millenium using a technique I”ve been working on for a couple of years called time-lapse phonography. The 857 songs used to make the piece are analyzed digitally and a spectral average is then derived from the entire song. Just as a long camera exposure will fuse motion into a single image, spectral averaging allows us to look at the average sonority of a piece of music, however long, giving a sort of average timbre of a piece. This gives us a sense of the average key and register of the song, as well as some clues about the production values present at the time the record was made; for example, the improvements in home stereo equipment over the past fifty years, as well as the gradual replacement of (relatively low-fidelity) AM radio with FM broadcasting has had an impact on how records are mixed… drums and bass lines gradually become louder as you approach the present, increasing the amount of spectral noise and low tones in our averages.

Link (Thanks, Arwen!)

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The Sponsor Spank

Thanks to our lovely sponsors this week: the ASPCA, 2K Sports and American Apparel.
Want to advertise here? The Screenhead Ad Info Page. It”s crafted entirely from snippets of Iron Maiden lyrics, it is.

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The Yearly Wrap-Up

Picking the top 10 of the year proved a little too rough for us, so here’s 70 posts from 2005 which made an impression on us for one reason or another. We”re sure we”ve missed a few dozen, but these popped out as we cruised through the archives. Please enjoy, thanks for reading, have a good New Year”s Getting Completely Shitfaced, and we”ll see you Tuesday.