Category: Links Dump

Physics Buzz: Space invaders: cosmic rays arrive for their 100th birthday “Cosmic rays constantly bombard earth’s atmosphere at a rate of about 100 per square meter per second, but they don’t make it through intact. They collide with atmospheric molecules, setting of a cascading shower of secondary particles, such as neutrinos and muons. Researchers probably… Continue reading Links for 2009-10-02

slacktivist: In the belly of the fish “My fundie Bible teachers considered this the main, or even the only, point of this story worth considering. Their task, as they saw it, was to defend the story as being “literally” true, and so they’d share legends (see Bartley, James) of sailors swallowed by whales and go… Continue reading Links for 2009-10-01

Oscar-O-Meter™: The A.V. Club’s third annual guide to the fall prestige movies, part one | Film | A.V. Club “Provided you take our word for it and don’t go back into the archives, the A.V. Club’s Oscar-O-Meter feature has quickly become the definitive tool for Oscar prognostication. Through a rigorously scientific process, our writers have… Continue reading Links for 2009-09-30

YouTube – LittleDog Clips and Outtakes Very cool walking robot footage. (tags: robots video youtube technology gadgets science) Essay – Why Good Writers Can Be Bad Conversationalists – NYTimes.com “Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I’m writing. I don’t claim this merely… Continue reading Links for 2009-09-29

Smarter people go to college, so average university students less intelligent? : Gene Expression “Remember that a substantial proportion of college graduates are less intelligent than a substantial proportion of those without college degrees. While the proportion of the population with college degrees increased, and that increase was disproportionately from the higher end of the… Continue reading Links for 2009-09-28

Fantastical Conceits and Turbulent Souls – The Barnes & Noble Review “[O]ne of the field’s premier independent publishers, NESFA Press, has just embarked on a six-volume set, The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, consolidating all of Zelazny’s fiction shy of novel length, as well as all his poems and non-fiction, chronologically sorted. (Available now, Volume… Continue reading Links for 2009-09-27

Zoom-Whirl Orbits in Black Hole Binaries Title of the week from PRL. (tags: science physics articles theory gravity) Phase-Slip Interferometry for Precision Force Measurements “We demonstrate a novel atom interferometric force sensor based on phase slips in the dynamic evolution of a squeezed-state array of degenerate 87Rb atoms confined in a one-dimensional optical lattice. The… Continue reading Links for 2009-09-26

The Microhistorical Unknown « Easily Distracted “One thing that frustrates me at times about “big history”, world history or large-scale historical sociology is the extent to which historians writing in those traditions tend to assume that it’s turtles all the way down, that the insights of big history extend symmetrically to the smallest scales of… Continue reading Links for 2009-09-25

$6/Kg to orbit — KarlSchroeder.com “The fact is, there is only one problem worth speaking about in space development, and that is the problem of cost-to-orbit. It currently costs around $10,000/kg to launch anything at all. That price will never come down as long as chemical rockets are the only technology we use. “ (tags:… Continue reading Links for 2009-09-24

Infinite Summer » Blog Archive » Summer’s End Roundtable, Part I “How about that ending, huh? “ (tags: books literature blogs infinite-summer) US LHC Blog » Relationships in Physics Graduate School “Doing a quick poll of graduate students in our department showed the following: * Atomic Physics: 5/10 grad students are married (2 of those… Continue reading Links for 2009-09-23