Links for 2010-01-26

“Scientists have proposed that there is a new, exotic type of star living in our universe that we haven’t seen yet. The so-called “electroweak stars”, if they exist, will be difficult to detect because they mostly emit neutrino’s – subatomic particles which, for the most part, don’t interact with ordinary matter.”

“Today my attention was caught by a triad of papers casually listed one after the other: written by different authors, but all on topics closely connected to an issue that these days a particle physicist cannot avoid paying attention to: one which presently constitutes the largest deviation of experimental measurements from standard model predictions. I am talking about the so-called “anomalous magnetic moment of the muon”, which is currently lying 3.1 standard deviations above theoretical predictions.”

“It’s rare that my co-workers and hip-hop become obsessed with the same thing. But The A.V. Club and hip-hop broadcast their love of The Wire from the mountains. I felt like I had to catch up with the show just so I’d be able to catch the Wire references that litter hip-hop songs. A show must be pretty fucking brilliant for hip-hop to embrace a phenomenon whose heroes are all cops, informants, and homosexuals.”