Lunch With George!

Agenda

• Bacteria Food
• Teoma
• Fog Screen
• Avogadro's Number
• Solid Rock

Remembering this while eating a less-than-exceptional grilled chicken salad at Rubio's, George decided to finish the salad since his bacteria would enjoy it, even if he didn't. He's probably gone a little overboard, but hey! He's got a colony to feed! After all, he's eating for 12 billion now.

Teoma

They were a startup search engine company that was bought out by Ask Jeeves. They use a slightly more refined approach to determining site relevance than Google. While Google determines the ranking of a site by how many other sites link to that site (and how high their ratings are), Teoma does the same but also adds in subject relevance. They refer to sites as being in "Subject Communities."

I assume that means that if there was a Camping and Hiking web site, its ranking would be improved more by links from other outdoor sites than by links from a dumb baseball site or a site about two guys going to lunch. You can read their explanation here.

As an example of the difference between Google and Teoma, here's the same search for "Special Relativity Discussion" in both engines:

Teoma: results

Google: results

Even though I enjoy the fact that Lunch With George is the "I'm Feeling Lucky" link for this search on Google, if I were performing this search with a genuine interest in the topic, I think I would be more pleased with the Teoma results.

If I get some time, I'll try several other search strings in both search engines and post the results.

Fog Screen

I was telling George about a clever new technology for projecting movies and slides in mid-air. The

I haven't figured out a lot of practical uses for this, but it sure is cool. They people at the company haven't thought of a lot of Earth-changing uses, either:

"The images projected onto the FogScreen seem magical, like in a vision. As the screen itself can appear from nowhere, and disappear again, it creates huge possibilities for use in theater plays and concerts. For example, you can use the FogScreen to create a fantastic horror show, to project a horrible monster on the screen, and to make the real thing appear to come right through the screen."

Avogadro's Number

Amedeo Avogadro

George has been reading Bill Bryson's book

Avogadro was born in Italy in 1776, and although he was a successful lawyer, his interest in science led him to Natural Philosophy (Aha! A Quicksilver tie-in!), and he began his scientific career in 1803. Although the value known as Avogadro's Number was identified many years after his death, it is based on Avogadro's Principle: Equal volumes of all gases at the same temperature and pressure contain the same number of molecules.

Do you know what a mole is? Not the rodent, but the number. The number of Carbon-12 atoms in 12 grams of Carbon-12 is now considered to be 6.0221367 x 10²³. This number is known as a mole. Because Avogadro's ideas led to the concept of a mole, this number was named Avogadro's Number.

Science students are often provided with (and conceive of themselves) illustrations of just how big Avogadro's Number is. Here are a few:

• An Avogadro's Number of aluminum soda cans would cover the entire Earth's surface to a depth of 200 miles.
• An Avogadro's Number of popcorn kernels (unpopped) would cover the continental U.S. to a depth of 9 miles.
• If you could count 10 million atoms per second, it would take you 2 billion years to count the Carbon-12 atoms in 12 cubic centimeters (a mole).

When George was telling me about Bryson's mention of Avogadro's number, I remembered reading about this Avogadro guy only the day before. I had seen a link to a science story which announced a new value for Avogadro's Number! A team led by Peter Becker at the PTB Standards Laboratory in Braunschweig, Germany used x-ray measurement techniques on a single crystal of silicon to arrive at a new value for Avogadro's Number: 6.0221353 x 10²³.

Solid Rock

Bouldering area at Solid Rock

I had told George a few weeks ago about a new indoor rock-climbing gym being built in North Scottsdale,

They are offering very competitive pricing on memberships, and if purchased during the month of October, you can buy one membership and get another one free (or double the length of one membership). Their rate for a day pass ($10) is identical to that of Phoenix Rock Gym in Tempe, where George and I have climbed countless times.

PHOENIX-AREA ROCK GYMS
Gym	Day pass	Monthly pass	Annual pass	LWG Special Award for:
AZ on the Rocks	$15	$60	$500	Coolest Website, Air Conditioning
ClimbMax	$8	$30	$270	State's smallest gym (bouldering only)
Phoenix Rock Gym	$10	$40	$350	Close to Ted's, great staff
Solid Rock	$10	$40	$395	Rock-like climbing surfaces

Solid Rock will offer top-roped climbing, a rapelling tower, a bouldering area with a cave roof, and a lead-climbing area. Check out these great 3-D drawings! This situation is very cool for me. By the start of 2004, there will be a rock gym less than two miles from my house, another one less than a mile from my work, and a third one only a mile from my usual route home after picking my daughters up at school. Of course, with Ted's Hot Dogs being only two miles away from PRG, it still wins hands-down.