I’ve been slacking a bit, lately, in terms of putting science-related content on the blog. Up until last week, most of my physics-explaining energy was going into working on the book, and on top of that, I’ve been a little preoccupied with planning for the arrival of FutureBaby. I’d like to push things back in… Continue reading Peer-Reviewed Egoboo: The Metastable Xenon Project
What Humanists Think
Last weekend’s post, The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, has been lightly edited and re-printed at Inside Higher Ed, where it should be read by a larger audience of humanities types. They allow comments, so it will be interesting to see what gets said about it there. I may have some additional comments on the issue later,… Continue reading What Humanists Think
What Theoretical Physicists Think
Last week, I was asked my expectations about the LHC, and offered my half-assed guess. If you prefer your speculation from people with relevant knowledge of the subject, Sean Carroll weighs in with his oddly-precise guesses. On a related, less theoretical note, Tomasso Dorigo posted a summary of the constraints on the Higgs boson mass… Continue reading What Theoretical Physicists Think
What Do You Think?
As you may or may not have seen from the banner ads on the site (depending on whether you read via RSS or not), ScienceBlogs is running a Reader Survey at the moment. Here’s your chance to tell the Corporate Masters that they really need to sign up some more physics blogs. Or, you know,… Continue reading What Do You Think?
Rocket Science: Still Hard
Bad news from the worthwhile sections of this morning’s New York Times: another SpaceX rocket blew up. A privately funded rocket was lost on its way to space Saturday night, bringing a third failure in a row to an Internet multimillionaire’s effort to create a market for low-cost space-delivery. The accident occurred a little more… Continue reading Rocket Science: Still Hard
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
Every week, the New York Times Magazine features some sort of profile article about a person or group of people who are supposed to represent some sort of trend. Every week, the people they choose to write up come off as vaguely horrible, usually in some sort of entitled-suburbanite fashion. I’m not sure if this… Continue reading Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
links for 2008-08-03 [delicious.com]
Museum Review – At the Insectarium, Getting Down With All That Skitters, Buzzes or Crawls – Review – NYTimes.com "In the new $25 million Audubon Insectarium, which opened here in June, you can watch Formosan termites eat through a wooden skyline of New Orleans…, stick your head into a transparent dome in a kitchen closet… Continue reading links for 2008-08-03 [delicious.com]
Breaking News: College Students Drink
I subscribe to a bunch of EurekAlert RSS feeds, including the “Education” feed, which could often be re-named “The Journal of Unsurprising Results.” Take, for example, today’s ground-breaking study, Male college students more likely than less-educated peers to commit property crimes, which comes complete with the subhead “Sociological research reveals paradox of higher education, crime”:… Continue reading Breaking News: College Students Drink
Correlation and Causation
Around 20% of women who go into labor do so after eating Chinese food. Another 17% or so go into labor after eating Indian food. True facts.
links for 2008-08-02 [delicious.com]
Temporally Controlled Modulation of Antihydrogen Production and the Temperature Scaling of Antiproton-Positron Recombination "Our observations have established a pulsed source of atomic antimatter, with a rise time of about 1 s, and a pulse length ranging from 3 to 100 s. " (tags: physics science particles experiment articles) Hidden Variable Models for Quantum Theory Cannot… Continue reading links for 2008-08-02 [delicious.com]