Category: Links Dump

News: Profs Turned Pols – Inside Higher Ed “From local school board races to Congressional campaigns, an effort is under way to push scientists out of the lab and onto the stump. Through a series of Web-based seminars and organizing efforts on university campuses, Scientists & Engineers for America (SEA) has been luring professors and… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-15

Blue laser awesomeness : Dot Physics “Yes, green laser pointers are cool. Especially when you use them to make stuff fluoresce. Ok, what about a blue laser pointer? They are getting surprisingly cheap (Amazon has a 10 mW for pretty cheap). Still not cheap enough for me. But, you know what? Some of the physics… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-14

Cocktail Party Physics: oily hair is not a problem – its a solution for the gulf coast “One of the more interesting solutions proposed (aside from dropping trash in the pipe to block the oil) also involves using fibers; however, the fibers in question are human hair. Chicken feathers, straw, and wool have all been… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-13

The Science and Entertainment Exchange: The X-Change Files: Tony Stark’s Science “While the film naturally took some liberties with the details — sci-fi has the luxury of not having to pass peer review — Marvel Studios nonetheless cared enough about plausibility to ask the Science & Entertainment Exchange for a suitable scientist with whom they… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-11

Against a Definition of Science Fiction — Paul Kincaid “When I called my collection of essays and reviews What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction, I was struggling toward something I could not fully articulate. I don’t know what is involved in reading science fiction, because I don’t know what science fiction… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-10

Jason Sanford: Living in a world where most writers suck I find bad writing to be cross-generational and not caused by someone loving video games or fanfic. If you turned Shakespeare loose on gaming or fanfic, he’d likely come up with some great stories. He’d also come up with some horrible stories–don’t forget that before… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-09

YouTube – Walk on water “Liquid Mountaineering is a new sport which is attempting to achieve what man has tried to do for centuries: walk on water. Or to be more precise: running on water. We are developing the sport from scratch. By accident we found out that with the right water repellent equipment you… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-08

Microsoft’s PowerPoint isn’t evil if you learn how to use it. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine I’ve seen more terrible slide presentations in my life than good ones, but that stat isn’t necessarily an indictment of the program–I’ve also encountered a lot more terrible books than terrific ones, and I’ve certainly seen more… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-07

Particle Detector Shows Promise, if Nothing Else – NYTimes.com “A new widely anticipated experiment underneath a mountain in Italy designed to detect a sea of dark particles that allegedly constitute a quarter of creation did not see anything during a test run last fall, scientists reported Saturday. But, they said, the clarity with which they… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-06

Being Complementary About Uncertainty : Built on Facts “Complementarity is a very general concept and not easy to define formally, though informally you might say it’s the principle that the wave-like and particle-like aspects of an object can’t be simultaneously observed. More formally you could say that each degree of freedom of a system corresponds… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-05