Big news out of the CTEQ school tonight: we discovered that the various Twitter feeds which announce new arXiv papers only show you the title of the paper, not the author — not until you click on the link, anyway. So here’s a neat way to have fun at parties: someone who has a smartphone (or tablet) with a Twitter app brings up one of the aforementioned feeds, like HEPExperPapers, picks a paper title, and everyone tries to guess who the authors are, or at least which research group or institution is behind it. Anything with \(\sqrt{s} = \unit{7}{\tera\electronvolt}\) doesn’t count. Converting this into a drinking game is easy, you just drink every time you get it wrong. (i.e. every time) Or every time you get it right. (i.e. never) Or just have a beer in hand. I’m sure that’s within the error bars.

Oh, and for the record: one of the people behind this brilliant idea happens to be the chair of a major university’s physics department.

I bought a set of four new hall pong paddles today, and you know what that means… or maybe not. It was time to try out 2v2 hall pong!

Since its inception early this year, hall pong has always been a 1-on-1 sport. (Simply because we always had only 2 paddles) The thing is, when playing 1-on-1, whenever you work the ball up the court, you’re abandoning the defense of your goal, which means that if you don’t score, your opponent has a clear shot. It tends to lead to rather quick points. Besides, there’s only so much creativity involved in the kinds of plays you can make — basically it’s just a matter of how close you’re willing to get to your opponent’s goal before you decide to spike it on them. Either you take a long shot, which is easy to block, or you get up close and then it turns into a struggle for who can get a lucky hit on the ball in one direction or another.

Adding another person to each side introduces a whole new level of strategy, though. When you’re playing doubles, you still have the same …

One of the things you’ll notice if you ever play hall pong is that ping pong balls will break, and fairly easily, too. (Especially the tournament quality 3-star balls) The logical way to get around that is of course to use harder balls, like whiffle-style practice golf balls. They’re made of much tougher plastic, so you can use just one for a long time.

But using a different ball also changes the dynamics of the game significantly. For one thing, they’re more massive, so they don’t slow down as much while flying. A hall pong court is just long enough that you can hit a ping pong ball from one end to the other and have it arrive at a reasonably slow speed, but these practice golf balls can seem to come at you like bullets. It makes defense a lot harder and really tests your reflexes.

The other thing about the heavier balls is that they don’t seem to bounce as well. Or rather, they bounce and keep going just about as fast as they were going before. So on defense, you’ll have a tendency to be jabbing your paddle at the ground …