The video that accompanies this PopSci.com article is pretty impressive. A bunch of college kids show off their ability to hit trick shots with ping-pong balls, bouncing them off walls, doors, floors, moving skateboards, people, and items of furniture and into beer cups. As the PopSci piece notes, there’s a good deal of physics in… Continue reading Non-Dorky Poll: Beer Pong
Month: May 2008
Caw!
In honor of the Japanese crow story in today’s Links Dump, here’s a filler post with a picture of a Japanese crow:
links for 2008-05-08
Japan Fights Crowds of Crows – New York Times “This is the Crow Patrol of utility company Kyushu Electric Power, on the hunt for crows whose nests on electric poles have caused a string of blackouts in [Kagoshima] on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu.” (tags: Japan animals travel) Breaking Murphy’s Law “There are a lot… Continue reading links for 2008-05-08
Pimp Me Old Papers
As seen in a recent links dump, gg at Skulls in the Stars posted a fun challenge for science bloggers: My “challenge”, for those sciencebloggers who choose to accept it, is this: read and research an old, classic scientific paper and write a blog post about it. I recommend choosing something pre- World War II,… Continue reading Pimp Me Old Papers
Novels of Science
Writing in Scientific American, Mark Alpert argues that we need more novels about science: A good work of fiction can convey the smells of a laboratory, the colors of a dissected heart, the anxieties of a chemist and the joys of an astronomer–all the illuminating particulars that you won’t find in a peer-reviewed article in… Continue reading Novels of Science
Put Down the Laser Pointer
For all the ranting people do about the evils of PowerPoint, it seems to me that people are missing the one bit of technology that is most responsible for incomprehensible presentations in science: the laser pointer. Having watched a bunch of student talks last week, I was reminded once again of just how useless laser… Continue reading Put Down the Laser Pointer
links for 2008-05-07
Swans on Tea » Doomed to Fail “A thought experiment that finds a contradiction has only shown that the transforms have not been properly applied — the author has made a math error, or made a bad assumption” (tags: physics relativity science education) Dark Matter Searches at Colliders – part III « A Quantum Diaries… Continue reading links for 2008-05-07
Little Brother for Free
Speaking of YA literature (as I was, briefly, in the previous post), I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Cory Doctorow has put up a Little Brother section on his web site, promoting his new book. As with all of his books, it’s available for free download, so if you’d like to read… Continue reading Little Brother for Free
Get a Grip!
A few days back, John Scalzi posted a piece celebrating YA books and authors, which included some reading recommendations. In the comments, a few people said that as childless adults they were reluctant to go into the YA section of the store, lest people think they were creeps looking for kids to prey upon. I… Continue reading Get a Grip!
Iain M. Banks, Matter [Library of Babel]
The latest book by Iain M. Banks proudly proclaims itself to be a Culture novel– part of a loosely connected series of novels and stories about humans living in a vast and utopian galactic civilization– which makes its opening in a castles-and-kings milieu somewhat surprising. Well, all right, technically it opens with a prologue in… Continue reading Iain M. Banks, Matter [Library of Babel]