Actually, Carol did have a point. A lot of the questions in the longer questionaire could have been objectively answered by an outside observer, but trying to determine things like my political alignment would have been quite subjective.

Of course, it's an open question whether my own opinion of my political alignment would have been any more accurate than their judgment of it. After all, the Pew survey of reporters in the US showed that they tended to see themselves as "moderate" and "centrist" even though there's good independent evidence that they average much more leftist than the general population of the US.

I'm also one of those people whose overall political views don't permit me to easily fit in any of the classic boxes. Given that I support the war, feel pride in being American, have no interest in thinking of myself as a "citizen of the world", think that affirmative action has reached the point of causing more problems than it cures, oppose "identity politics", feel that equal opportunity is more important than equal results and see them as mutually exclusive, and strongly oppose socialism, leftists generally seem to think I'm conservative.

But how, then, to explain my support for legal gay marriage, legalization of prostitution, legalization of marijuana, and opposition to school prayer? How to explain the fact that I despise Jerry Falwell as much as I despise Noam Chomsky? As I wrote last year, as far as I can tell, I am both a liberal and a conservative.

One of my readers coined the term "engineerist" to describe me, but that wasn't one of the choices on the survey.

From what I read (and I admit I didn't read the entire post) -- and my experience with grant applications/rewards in a scientific setting -- my opinion is that SOMEONE obtained funding to conduct a survey of blogs. This could be academic BS or it could be a marketing angle disguised as academic BS. From the slant of the questions, it could be really poor academic research or journalism or marketing (thinking consultants to election campaigns, given the question).

It doesn't even seem to be that formal. This is distinctly low tech, and there probably wasn't any grant involved at all. The longer questionaire was sent by two Ph.D candidates, and the shorter one by a full professor. These look to me like "what is something we can do easily and cheaply which will permit us to produce something we can publish?"

Speaking of link-whoring, I had a curious experience with that which left me feeling a bit bewildered. Somebody named Norm, owner and operator of yet-another-site-on.blogspot.com, sent me a copy of a post he'd written. I responded as I always do when I receive such things:

Please do not send me "courtesy copies" or announcements of posts on your site, unless they are responses to posts on my site.

That's one of my standard replies. (If there were multiple addressees, I will respond, "Please remove me from this mailing list.")

Norm answered me:

Sure...it's just that someone sent me a half a dozen posts/copies (?) from your site. As I get dozens of such things daily I just supposed you want some recent posts back. I have told my filtering program to block any posts copies or mention of you name or site from my email reception system. That should do it.

I checked my email archives, and my "please do not send" was the only email I've ever sent to this dude. And there had only been one previous email from him, about three weeks ago, which was also a "courtesy copy" of a post he'd made. (I apparently missed it, and didn't send my routine response that time.)

If someone mailed him any of my articles, I sure had nothing to do with it. So why would that somehow suggest I wanted to receive the same from him?

Fact is, I would probably be getting dozens of "courtesy copies" of people's blog posts per week if I had not started routinely responding as I did to him. But it seems faintly implausible that he gets dozens of them per day. If he's got that kind of visibility, why is he whoring for links?

I also don't understand the logic behind his response. Why would it be that having him put me in his Bozo Bin would solve the problem of his link-whoring? In the one-and-only email I have ever sent to him, I didn't even mention my Bozo Bin or threaten to put him in it. But after that response, he's in it now.

Meanwhile, Michael wrote:

I have a question that's been rolling around in my head for a few years, but I've never had anyone to ask.

The quick and dirty of it is--Is it possible to build a device that does the opposite of a microwave oven? Something along the lines of putting a room-temperature beverage in, pushing a button, and thirty seconds later it's cooled to a refreshing 38 degrees?

I remember from way back in high-school physical science class that heating something was basically just speeding up the molecules--the more they moved, the hotter it got, and that cooling-off was actually molecules slowing down, with absolute zero being no molecular movement (Is this true? It's been awhile).

I may be way off here, but isn't the theory behind a microwave oven just shooting microwaves through a piece of food to make the molecules move faster? Could we somehow do the opposite--figure some way to slow molecular movement 'faster' than putting an object in a colder environment?

The uses for a device like this would be unlimited--from food preparation and storage, all the way up to military (masking heat signatures against infrared).

I'm afraid that there are all kinds of things which would be really useful, except for the fact that they're impossible.

A box could be built which would cool something down rapidly, as long as you didn't mind connecting a bottle of liquid nitrogen to it. But doing something like that with radiation isn't possible.

There are engineering jokes which pass around which laymen either don't think is funny, or don't even understand. In the movie Ghostbusters, there's a sign in the background of one scene that says, "Danger! 10,000 Ohms!" I cannot explain to laymen why people like me think that is uproariously funny. (And I'd love to know who was responsible for that sign.)

Back when I was a cub engineer at Tektronix, I remember seeing a specification sheet for a purported member of of TI's 7400 SSI family, which I believe was described as the "7412½ Dual 4-output But gate". I thought it was funny, but most laymen don't even understand the reference.

It seems hard to believe, but there was a time when Light Emitting Diodes were new and strange and somewhat expensive. (Say, back around the time fire was discovered.) I remember when LEDs first started getting produced in reasonable quantity. And they were then, and remain today, pretty cool.

They're cool because they're nifty, but they're also cool because they're efficient and don't generate a lot of parasitic heat.

I guess it was inevitable that engineers would start talking about a companion device called a Dark Emitting Diode. I hit the search engines, and found that these days that term usually refers to an LED which has burned out. That wasn't what we meant, though.

If one kind of fixture can emit light, and make a scene brighter, why shouldn't it be possible to create a different kind of fixture which emitted dark, and made a scene less bright? Think of the uses!

The mathematics makes perfect sense, and in fact some 3D rendering packages allow the user to create negative lights which behave in exactly that way and reduce the lighting level on whatever surfaces they strike. But in the real world, physics doesn't allow it.

You'd have to create photons which contained negative energy, so that when they struck the target, they'd nullify photons carrying positive energy which also struck the target. Fewer un-nullified positive-energy photons would strike the scene, and the object would be darker.

But there's no such thing as "negative energy". It isn't nonsense; it is a completely understandable concept. But it isn't physically possible. Which is a shame, because it would be extremely useful.

Of course, interference patterns do include dark and light zones. Their size is a function of the wavelengths involved, and the total light energy over the whole pattern is the sum of the energies of the two interfering light beams. In interference patterns, light isn't being cancelled, it's just being rearranged.

There's no such thing as "dark". That's a concept we have created and given a name which has no physical reality. That which we refer to "darkness" is actually a relative absence of light.

There's also no such thing as "cold". There are only differing amounts of heat, and those things which we refer to as "cold" are relatively less hot.

Heat is energy; light is also energy. For most people, "light" is "visible light", but in reality all electromagnetic radiation is the same, differing only in energy level. There is no qualitative difference between gamma rays, ultraviolet, "visible" light, infrared, microwaves, and radio. It's one big continuum and the only difference between gamma rays and radio is the wavelength and the amount of energy per photon, though that one difference is a huge one.

As Michael says, a microwave oven works by generating microwaves and shooting them at food and whatever which is inside the oven. In one sense, it's generating a beam of light. But conceptually that's not really the right way to think of it. There is a sense in which "light" and "magnetic fields" and "electric fields" are all aspects of the same thing. In a microwave oven the right way to think about what's going on is that the transmitter in the oven is creating an extremely energetic field whose polarity flips back and forth at about 2.4 gigahertz. Any molecule which is polarized will try to flip with the field, but may not be able to do so very well. The 2.4 gigahz frequency was chosen because water molecules are highly polarized and respond quite well to that frequency. They really like to dance at that rate.

So the field makes water molecules in the food vibrate, and that's why the food gets warm.

The energy flow also makes sense. The water molecules flip as the field changes, but they lag it a bit. Since they're mostly aligned the same way, they all contribute to a pretty big field. That field impedes the microwave transmitter as it tries to change its own field, and to overcome that it has to expend energy.

Why can't this run the other way? Why can't we somehow beam energy in to make things colder? Because if we're beaming energy in then the total energy present rises, and things will get warmer, not colder.

To do what Michael wants, we'd have to somehow produce a kind of radiation which we could shoot in which reduced the amount of energy in the food. There are ways that can be done in certain special cases, but none of them are of any use in this application.

For instance, if you induce an endothermic chemical reaction, things get colder, but I don't think there are any candidate reactions which are possible with Coca Cola or beer. (And what would it taste like afterwards?)

If the energy beamed in then beamed right back out again, it might carry more energy away with it. That happens in a laser, for instance, and that's part of the process used to produce Bose-Einstein condensates. But you aren't going to get typical beverages to do anything like that.

Could we produce an interference pattern? Yes, but all that would do is make some areas get really hot while other areas didn't change. Nothing would get colder.

What Michael wants is for the transmitter to project "dark" into the chamber, instead of "light". When the beam of dark struck something, the energy of whatever it hit would be reduced. That amounts to saying that the photons in the beam inherently had negative energy, and there's no such thing as "negative energy". There's no such thing as a photon which contains negative energy. (At least, not when you're talking about real photons. When you talk about virtual photons, I start getting a headache, since they seem to sometimes transmit negative momentum, a concept which does not make any sense to me. Anyway, that doesn't matter because we can't use virtual photons for this, either.)

Or we would have to do something to the beverage which made it beam energy out. There isn't anything we can do to make it do that. But it already does do that; everything does. It's known as "black body radiation".

It's a function of temperature and surface properties. The earth does it, and that's why it gets "cold" at night; energy from the surface of the earth is radiated away into space in the form of infrared.

But there's a physical limit to that rate, and as far as I know it is impossible to transcend that rate. Nonetheless, it is possible to design a box which utilized this physical property as a way of cooling a beverage. Sadly, it would be expensive, difficult, and wouldn't cool a beverage very rapidly.

An object put in this hypothetical high-tech cooler would radiate some heat away, and in turn the walls of the chamber would also radiate heat. Radiation from the walls hits the beverage, radiation from the beverage hits the walls. Ignoring any other effects (e.g. convection), the tendency is for the temperature to average out, taking into account the amount of thermal mass of each. So if the beverage is warmer than the walls, the beverage would cool and the walls would warm, and the system would asymptotically approach equilibrium.

The ideal case would be if the walls of the chamber emitted almost no radiation at all, and absorbed virtually all the radiation which struck them. In other words, the walls would have to be made of graphite and would have to be cooled down to a few degrees K. Then, if the chamber was brought down to a hard vacuum, the object would cool at its fastest possible rate via emission of black body radiation. The paint on the beverage container would then determine how close the process came to the theoretical limit.

But that isn't what Michael asked for; this doesn't involve actively beaming radiation in to induce cooling. It would take a lot longer than half a minute to evacuate the chamber and cool the walls of it so that the object would then cool off by emitting radiation. And your soda can might explode in the vacuum.

What he wants really can't be done using radiation. It is possible to increase the energy in some mass at an arbitrarily rapid rate with radiation, but removing energy with radiation is subject to severe physical limits which won't permit development and sale of a dual-mode microwave oven/refrigerator.

Fact is, by far the easiest and fastest way to cool anything is with convection, direct contact between masses with different temperatures. That's why liquid nitrogen would help. You could cool your beverage in just a couple of seconds by putting it in a chamber and squirting enough liquid nitrogen in to do the job.

Understand that liquid nitrogen isn't literally "cold" because there's no such thing as "cold". But it's a lot less hot than the beverage. So heat would flow from the beverage to the nitrogen, averaging the heat energy level of both, and since the beverage loses energy in the transaction its temperature drops.

That's also what happens if you put a can of soda into the refrigerator. The walls of the refrigerator are low temperature, and that cools the air inside, which then cools the can. It goes faster in the freezer since the temperature differential is greater. But it doesn't go very fast in either because air has so little thermal mass and is a terrible heat conductor.

So a mixture of water and ice works faster. The water serves as a good conductor to carry heat from the can of soda to the ice. The soda's temperature drops, the ice warms and melts.

Even better yet is a mixture of alcohol