Month: October 2018

Enlarge / Patrons enjoy beverages outside Buster's Beer & Bait, one of the last bars in the area still open, as Hurricane Michael approaches the Florida panhandle, in Panama City Beach on Tuesday, Oct. 09. (credit: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

11:30am ET Update: The National Hurricane Center says Hurricane Michael has continued to intensify Wednesday. As of 11:30am ET, the storm had 150mph winds. Its central pressure also continues to plummet, dropping to 923 millibars and indicating better overall organization. This means that Michael is almost certain to be among the top 10 most intense landfalling US hurricanes and could soon bypass Hurricane Andrew to enter the top five.

Original post: Hurricane Michael continued to intensify during Tuesday night, bringing an unprecedentedly strong storm to the northwest Florida coast on Wednesday. This is a serious situation for the Florida Panhandle and downstream areas in southeastern Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas.

As of the National Hurricane Center's 9:30am ET update, Michael had 145mph sustained winds, solidly in the range of a Category-4 major hurricane. Winds along the Florida coast were already rising above tropical storm strength at the time, all but closing the window for further evacuations as the storm nears shore and moves inland later today.

Ron Amadeo

NEW YORK—After an almost endless number of leaks, the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL have finally been unleashed. After scavenging the show floor for info and some experience with the new handsets, we're back to talk impressions.

The first thing you notice when you pick up either Pixel 3 is the back texture. The Pixel phones have traditionally had a two-tone look, accomplished in the past by a mostly metal back with a glass top. This year the back is all glass, but the two-tone look remains thanks to two different treatments to the glass. The top is bare, shiny glass and a fingerprint magnet, while the rest of the phone has a soft-touch, satin-like matte coating.

Enlarge / "Please prepare the cabin for technical discussions of physics..."

Werner Heisenberg won the 1932 Nobel Prize for helping to found the field of quantum mechanics and developing foundational ideas like the Copenhagen interpretation and the uncertainty principle. The story goes that he once said that, if he were allowed to ask God two questions, they would be, “Why quantum mechanics? And why turbulence?” Supposedly, he was pretty sure God would be able to answer the first question.

Werner Heisenberg.

The quote may be apocryphal, and there are different versions floating around. Nevertheless, it is true that Heisenberg banged his head against the turbulence problem for several years.

His thesis advisor, Arnold Sommerfeld, assigned the turbulence problem to Heisenberg simply because he thought none of his other students were up to the challenge—and this list of students included future luminaries like Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Bethe. But Heisenberg’s formidable math skills, which allowed him to make bold strides in quantum mechanics, only afforded him a partial and limited success with turbulence.