Kid Carter - Weekly Trivia!

Congrats to my Dad for guessing the correct answer to this week's trivia question! Gary Carter spent many years playing in Canada, but he never played for the Toronto Blue Jays, or the American League. He did, however, spend 15 glorious seasons with the Expos and Mets before doing one-year west coast stints with the Giants and Dodgers before returning back to Montreal.

He was enshrined as an Expo, but also had memorable years with the Mets.

The trivia question this week (+.5) will not return to physics just yet - I took a quick break to read The Hunger Games. There's just something about dystopian future stories that stimulate the brain and warm the soul. Now that I'm thinking about it, I should do a post on the top 10 dystopian future stories of all-time.

On that note my question is: which of the following dystopian future movies features Robert De Niro in a supporting role?

• Blade Runner
• Twelve Monkeys
• Gattaca
• Rollerball
• Brazil

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Since I'm a bit late in posting the trivia question this week, I've also included a song to dissolve any rancor. Enjoy.

The 2nd Annual All-Kevin Love Team

There is no greater honor in basketball than inclusion in the All-Kevin Love team. Its prestige has propelled many to new fame and fortune. Just ask selections from last year's inaugural team: alums like Ryan Anderson, now a fantasy juggernaut ranked 6th overall in Yahoo. I put my money where my prose is and drafted Anderson, along with fellow honoree Jared Dudley this year with great success. And let's not forget Ian Mahinmi, who has earned mentions in a record number of TDZ blog entries (7), plus some minor plaudits from the lamestream media. Powerful stuff.

YES! I live for minor plaudits!

As the NBA hits the All-Star break, TDZ once again goes rooting around the back of the NBA fridge for the forgotten and unappreciated players who are riding the back shelf, only getting snack time duty when they deserve full meal time minutes.

Schrödinger's Red Herring - Weekly Trivia!

This was probably the toughest physics question yet: it's one thing to know the basics of quantum mechanics, but it's a whole other deal having to also remember who came up with what. In this case, Greene credits Richard Feynman with the revolutionary thinking that the electron goes through both slits in the double slit experiment. Congrats to Matt-O for claiming this week's bragging rights!

I noticed that the other two responses were for Erwin Schrödinger, and I'm not surprised. His popular thought experiment - Schrödinger's Cat - dealt with another duality (the cat being both alive and dead with the box unopened). Seeing that kind of thinking would have made me guess ol' Easy E. Schrödingy myself, but Ricky Feyn came up with the thinking here, sans feline.

This week I'm going to make a departure from physics to honor the life and career of one of baseball's greatest catchers, Gary Carter.  One of the most likeable players in baseball, "Kid" was an 11-time All-Star, a World Series winner, and an inductee to the Hall of Fame in 2003. He died at just 57 years of age after a battle with brain cancer.

My question: Which of the following teams did Gary Carter NOT play for?

• Los Angeles Dodgers
• San Francisco Giants
• Toronto Blue Jays
• New York Mets
• Montreal Expos

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Lastly - as if the Gary Carter news isn't depressing enough - I wanted to let all my TDZ acolytes know that my postings may be more infrequent over the next few months due to my work schedule and pursuit of personal goals. I will absolutely continue to do trivia every week, but longer length mind-blowing TDZ articles will probably be fewer and farther between. You can still expect such gems as the All-Kevin Love Team 2k12, NHL Playoff Smorgasbord, and TDZ's Fantasy Baseball Toolkit, though, so keep on checking in from time to time!

Timmy Retires

For those living under a rock over the last 48 hours: legendary Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield has retired from the great game of baseball. For a list of his achievements, check out his TDZ Retrospective. Aside from his athletic exploits, he was the rare type of player that understood and embraced the meaning the Red Sox as a team has for its fans, an understanding that comes through in his emotional final remarks. 

For 19 season, Tim Wakefield's knuckleball made hitters look like knuckleheads. Even during the steroid era, Wake's unique style of pitching flourished, and he fulfilled every role the Red Sox needed. When they needed a starter to carry them, he somehow became an ace (1995). When they needed a closer, he became one (1999). And when they needed a spot start, or a guy to just eat up inning after inning in a blowout so that the entire staff could heal up, he did that, too. All with class.

Congrats to Timmy for a great career.

Trying to Colbert the Wait

It came to my attention today that production of the Colbert Report stopped this week "due to unforeseen circumstances."

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Whether or not it has been obvious to you the readers, I've been a pupil of Colbert ever since I began my journalism career one year ago with this blog. His blowhard style and resolute convictions in the face of "facts" have been an inspiration to the satire I poorly endeavor to employ on a sporadic basis. I hope that these "unforeseen circumstances" are not of the serious variety, or at the very least that they reach a gentle conclusion so that the funniest guy on late night TV can return soon.

TDZ and the Quantum of Flawless - Weekly Trivia!

Talk about rock stars! This week, the TDZ trivia triumvirate was successful in identifying "h" as the letter representing the Planck constant. I don't think I would have remembered that without reading the book, so I'm impressed. Congrats to all.

If you secretly want to own this T-shirt, you are a hipster of the worst order.

My admiration quickly turns to disappointment, however, since no one knew the TV show that uses the name Heisenberg. The answer is Breaking Bad. You nerds need to watch more TV, for real.

Part of me thinks I should abandon physics and stump you on sports or pop culture, but that would be taking the easy way out. So here we go:

Whose perspective revolutionized the understanding of the double slit experiment by suggesting that electrons do not go through one slit or the other, but through both?

• Richard Feynman
• Erwin Schrödinger
• Louis de Broglie
• Max Born
• Albert Einstein

Good luck, and have a great week.

Retro Smoov

As of late, TDZ has descended into a sports logo and jersey design obsession. Today, I reach the inevitable conclusion to this fashion fixation: retro jerseys.

As a general rule, more citrus colors = more retro.

When going retro, however, it's not just about the incredible, blinding designs that defined an era (mostly the 80's). It's also about the name on the back. This added dimension makes retro jerseys an even stronger fashion statement, and more fun to pick out.

Without further ado, TDZ gives the best - and worst - retro jerseys for his handsome, stylish readers to bolster their wardrobes.

Manning Face NFL Logo Compilation

How on Earth does someone combine my recent obsession with sports logos and my favorite object of sports schadenfreude? I have no idea, but the results are spectacular. Check 'em out. Seriously.

It was a tough loss today... my face was morphed into a bunch of team logos... we'll try to do better next year.

Apologies if you literally die from laughing at these like I almost did!

The Zen of Defeat

I was remarkably at peace following yesterday's Super Bowl loss by the Patriots. The team could've won - should've won, according to many - but going into the game, I didn't see a compelling reason why we had to be the winners. The Giants had just as much of a claim to the championship based on their season's performance, maybe even more than the Pats.

It's different if you steamroll the entire league like in 2007. This year, the Patriots won most of their games by close scores. Even the Washington Redskins - a team whose fans have to consciously will themselves not to throw a toaster into their own bath water on a weekly basis - gave New England some fits in the regular season. I had a sense of pride just making the big game this year. In 2007, all I felt was relief that our winning streak survived. The appeal of being an underdog (perceived or otherwise) has never been more clear to me than comparing this Super Bowl with their last.

Nearly the most incredible 4th quarter in Super Bowl history.

So I didn't require a championship like before, and because of that the game didn't hurt so much. Sure, it was disappointing, and I hate losing as much as anyone, but I could still smile at our near comeback and not feel that my team was mugged by some cruel, malicious fate.

At the end of the day (season, really), this is a team with a young defense and a lot of players making their first Super Bowl appearance. For that reason, I think the Pats are in a unique position to return to the Super Bowl soon, and I look forward to the coming season.

*exhale*

Vulcan Found

A "super earth" was recently discovered just 22 light years away orbiting in the habitable zone of a red dwarf that's part of a triple-star system.

Apparently, due to the infrared light of the red dwarf, the planet takes on a reddish hue. It's also 4.5 times larger than the Earth, ensuring that whatever beings living there are physically stronger than us - just like Vulcans.

Even if it's not Vulcan, the cool takeaway for me from this article is that planets may develop under more varied conditions and that there could be a lot more planets out there than initially thought. If only I could pull a Fry and wake up in the future to see what we discover. I'd live on Newt Gingrich's moon-base and society would gawk at me for my offensive old-timer ways.

Time Stands Still = Traveling at c, Reading TDZ - Weekly Trivia!

We still have a couple of physics aces this week! All three participants correctly recalled what special and general relativity are about, and two of those three remembered that special came before general.

In fact, special relativity brought about the need for general relativity. Einstein pondered how gravity, as Newton understood it, could exert instant and continuous (assuming no change in the mass causing the gravity) force across vast distances when special relativity indicated that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. As it turned out, Einstein was right - when a mass is suddenly introduced, the force of gravity it creates does travel at the speed of light as the mass exerts its influence over space.

Whatever, I still invented calculus. Leibniz is a dirty liar!

A simple visual example Greene gave was a mass dropped on a sheet, pulling in the surrounding plane of space. The universe is cool.

This week I'm moving on to the next chapter: quantum mechanics. I'm not a huge fan of microscopic, probabilistic physics, but let's face it: it's real, it happens, we all have to live with it. At least we're large enough beings that we don't have to worry about baseballs flying through bats and the like - as if hitting a baseball isn't hard enough!

Double slit experiment = woah.

Since my grasp of quantum mechanics isn't super strong, I'm going to go with sort of a simple question here:

"Which of the following symbols is used to represent the Planck constant?"

• w
• h
• p
• x
• μ

As usual, enter your answer at the bottom - good luck!

**SPECIAL BONUS QUESTION**

That siren noise you just imagined hearing means that there's a bonus question this week! It combines quantum mechanics with pop culture; please give your answer as a comment. The first person who answers correctly wins!

"Werner Heisenberg was a theoretical physicist who is famous for his foundational contribution to quantum mechanics in the form of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. In what TV show does one of the characters go by the name Heisenberg?"

Hint: it's a good show.