Baseball Season

For Valentine's Day, Beth surprised me with a gift of tickets for the Indians' final spring training games, when the play the Astros in Houston. And now that spring training has officially begun, I'm in a baseball kind of mood, for sure. There is a lot of hope in the air; A&M baseball began their season as the number one ranked team in the nation, the Indians have made some calculated risks on smart bargains bringing in Kerry Wood and Carl Pavano, and a slimmed-down Travis Hafner thinks he can steal a minimum of thirty bases this season.

Presumably to bring me down a couple of notches in terms of baseball spiritedness, ESPN Classic offered up this past week a replay of the memorable Game 7, extra-inning affair from the '97 World Series, pitting the Florida Marlins against my beloved Indians. I remember very well watching that game with my dad on a late October night. It was a very exciting game to watch but had an extremely disappointing ending.

My morbid curiousity got the better of me, so I started watching the replay. I even went so far as to call my dad and let him know that Jose Mesa was about to blow the save when the ninth inning came around. I was especially interested to see if I could identify the same scared, no-confidence look on Mesa's face as he entered the game that Omar Vizquel remebered seeing as described in his biography. When Mesa came in the Tribe had a slim 2-1 lead. I really didn't notice a lack of swagger, but it was immediately apparent that he was in for a rough time as he immediately surrendered a single to Moises Alou. He recovered though and got Bobby Bonilla out on strikes. Next came up the weak-hitting Charles Johnson, but he managed to put a good bat on the ball for a single, which advanced Alou to third. Mesa was now in a very tight spot, but with skinny, rookie infielder Craig Counsell coming to the plate; there was much reason to keep hope. As his long flyball fell into the mitt of Manny Ramirez, my heart sank once again as Alou crossed the plate to score the tying run.

Mesa got out of that inning, but the Indians' offense failed to muster any sort of scoring opportunity. The Indians would go on to lose in the 11th after the Marlins loaded up the bases, due in large part to a costly error by Tony Fernandez on an easily playable ball. Edgar Renteria famously bounced a ball over the pitcher and through a drawn-in infield to drive in the winning run.

Perhaps it would have been better to watch something else.

World's Smallest Radio

This month's Scientific American has a neat article on the recent nano-development out of Berkley. The materials scientists Zettl, et al successfully demonstrated that a single carbon nanotube could perform all the functions of a conventional radio: tuning, receiving a signal, discriminating between signal and carrier wave, and amplification of the signal.

Zettl acknowledges that the ability of a single nanotube to perform as a fully-integrated radio is quite serendipitous, even going so far as to describe work on this project as an example of Murphy's Law in reverse; where everything that can go wrong, magically does not. The article in the link at the top gives a nice overview of how the device works and what novel applications could emerge as a result of this work.

What was the first broadcast received by nanotube radio? The answer to that future barroom trivia question is Eric Clapton's Layla. In the video below, once the nanotube is tuned to the signal's frequency, it becomes an indistinguishable blur. Because of the physical "weirdness" at the nanoscale, the EM wave is sufficient to mechanically vibrate the tube. These vibrations causes a change in the current through the nanotube and causes an avalanche of electrons to be emitted from the tube's end, thereby amplifying the signal. This is the so-called Field Emission current. This current is then passed on to an audio loudspeaker and turned into an audible sound wave.

List-o-tron

1. I've been playing a lot of basketball recently, mostly pick-up games at the A&M rec center

2. Beth and I have been using the crockpot quite a bit, mostly using recipes from here.

3. Don't ever ask me to repair brakes on a bicycle. My current set-up is pretty ridiculous. As you can see in the picture above, if I need to stop in a pinch, my method of last resort is to grip and rip on the yellow cloth towel.

4. At the cyclotron, my tasks for the moment are as follows:

a. constructing light pipes by bundling together optical fibers

b. playing with 4-hour cure silicone rubber for the purpose of making various molds and clamps

c. testing different methods for wrapping scintillator detectors

d. gluing things together with optical cement

5. Maybe Beth and I will go to the NAHBS this weekend in Indy.