I’m actually surprised I haven’t seen this yet: a LOL-Krazy Kat.
The next step, of course, is a “LOL-ket,” done in Dirac bra-ket notation. You know, “In ur Hillburt spase, evolvin ur statez.”
Category Archives: Wobosphere fun
Science-Fictional Higher Education
Uh-oh.
A little while ago, my post on “The Physics of Non-Physical Systems” provoked some good discussion about how science, broadly construed, works in fiction. Perhaps “fails to work” would be a more accurate turn of phrase, since Joshua brought up a good point about the (ahem) midichlorians George Lucas introduced in the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
Why was everybody so annoyed when George Lucas brought up midichlorians in Episode I? Because the idea of microscopic life forms giving people superpowers is unscientific? Or because reducing “force sensitivity†to a bunch of microorganisms in your blood contradicted all the crap about will and focus that was central to the original trilogy?
If the former, then why do so many geeks enjoy X-Men or Spider-Man, whose premises are every bit as biologically nonsensical?
I pause to note that “midichlorian” is not in the Firefox spelling dictionary. Woot.
Continue reading Science-Fictional Higher Education
A Check to My Ambitions
So, my joke about ScienceBlogs: The Movie has gotten a little attention, which is nice. Unfortunately, I just received some dire news from a reliable source.
And as was discovered last year, you can’t actually make a movie for the Internet, otherwise you wind up with (2006’s) Snakes on a Plane. “Buzz on the Internet” can honestly sometimes be 200 people talking very loudly.
— Neil Gaiman (24 July 2007)
Tip o’ the top hat to, er, Neil Gaiman.
Handwriting
Zeno mourns that his calculus students can’t read their own handwriting. Not only do their 2s become zeds, but their thetas become phis and their phis become rhos:
[tex]\theta \rightarrow \phi,\ \varphi \rightarrow \rho.[/tex]
Personally, it was the xi which always gave me trouble. That stupid little [tex]\xi[/tex] never came out right — and I know I’m not alone here. In that introductory string theory course of sainted memory, Prof. Zwiebach astonished our whole class by writing them freehand on the blackboard.
You know, in retrospect, I wish my elementary school had skipped the cursive lessons and taught me how to write Greek letters. Oh, and “blackboard bold” characters too, the funky symbols with extra lines like [tex]\mathbb{R}[/tex] and [tex]\mathbb{C}[/tex] (these particular ones are used to stand for the real and complex number sets, respectively). I use Greek letters every day, but when was the last time I had to write in cursive?
My signature doesn’t count. That’s not writing; that’s a mad scribble. I don’t know if Mom ever wanted me to be a doctor, but I’ve lived up to that in one respect at least. My autograph starts with a smushed B, continues with a series of wiggles interrupted by a figure that’s more an ampersand than an S, followed by another brood of squiggles. The cross on the t slashes across my entire name like the mark of Zorro.
And nobody cares! The bank has never returned a rent check to me with a red stamp saying, “D minus for penmanship.”
Continue reading Handwriting
Philosophia Naturalis #12
The twelfth Philosophia Naturalis carnival is now ontube at Mollishka’s place. If you’re tired of me, run and get your physical science fix elsewhere (be sure to skip my contributions, then, of course)!
Oh, and don’t forget Skeptic’s Circle #65 over at Neurologica!
Experts in Weird Crawly Things Wanted
Do you know what these are? Supposedly, somewhere on the East Coast of the United States (near a brewery), this crawled out of the grass onto a pavement, snaked its way along for about five meters, and then returned to the grass.
(Via I Wish I Knew.)
Spam Statistics
Or, “Why oh why don’t people make raw data accessible?”
The Akismet people have made some statistics available on how many spam messages their WordPress plugin has trapped. They use a Flash applet to display their graph, which I hope means that the graph is being updated (instead of merely implying horrible software design). Here’s a screen shot from a moment ago:
This graph shows a few features of interest. First, there’s a big jump — of apparently several hundred thousand — legitimate messages in mid-May. I wonder if this actually represents a new spamming technique. Second, both “ham” and spam show periodicity. Running this time series through a Fourier transform might yield intriguing results.
Sadly, the Akismet folks aren’t providing actual numbers to go along with the pretty pictures, and extracting them from a graph like this doesn’t sound like my idea of a fun Wednesday afternoon.
I’d also be curious to see what the ratio of spams caught to Akismet plugins installed looks like as a function of time.
UPDATE (12 July 2007): The algorithm always finds raw data! The numbers necessary to draw the chart can be retrieved in XML format here, and the snapshots I’ve been playing with are here and here.
LOLScience!
Makyo picked up on my LOLCategory picture (“This category macro will, I suspect, make no sense to any of you, but amused me tremendously”). In the comments there, currytastegrit pointed to the lolscience LiveJournal community. My favorite there, I think — the one which truly made me “LOL” — was the following:
The Physics of Nonphysical Systems
We just heard Steinn Sigurðsson complain that there’s no science in Harry Potter, and therefore the book title The Science of Harry Potter is a non-starter. Jennifer Ouellette then leaped to its defense:
I think in this instance, I’d conjure the spirit of Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” :)
But then, that’s just the sort of viewpoint you’d expect from somone who wrote about the physics of the Buffyverse.
In a display of the kind of synchronicity one might expect whenever the system is large and the selection criteria are loose, Bee at Backreaction just pointed to a new paper on the arXiv, “Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun but Limited Science Literacy” (9 July 2007). C.J. Efthimiou and R.A. Llewellyn declare their intentions as follows:
In this article, we examine specific scenes from popular action and sci-fi movies and show how they blatantly break the laws of physics, all in the name of entertainment, but coincidentally contributing to science illiteracy.
Movies under their microscope include Speed (1994), where projectile motion is thrown out the window; Spiderman (2002), which stretches Newton past the breaking point; Aeon Flux (2005), whose muscles really have to torque; The Core (2003), which just doesn’t float at all; Superman (1978), which ought to make a physicist’s head spin; X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), whose finale is cut loose from reality; and The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), which I haven’t seen.
Continue reading The Physics of Nonphysical Systems
The Memes of Yesteryear
Again, it’s not saving the world, but what could make the world more worth saving than the “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” meme of twenty-aught-one, set to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”?
Continue reading The Memes of Yesteryear
Poisonous Buckets of Warm Spit
Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker writes of Gellman and Becker’s series on Vice President Cheney:
Given the ontological authority that the Post shares only with the New York Times, it is now, so to speak, official: for the past six years, Dick Cheney, the occupant of what John Adams called “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived,†has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy, and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable “war on terror.â€
Joel Achenbach complains that the New Yorker hasn’t yet learned to hyperlink, so here is a direct connection to Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.
LOLCategories
I was updating my category-theory reference list when I realized what simply had to be brought into being. Now, I will never be forgiven:
LOLCategories.
(Original picture from The Unapologetic Mathematician.)
UPDATE (11 July 2007): More esoteric lol-fun here.
Carnivalia and Blagrolling
Can you believe we’ve made it through sixty-three editions of the Skeptic’s Circle without being struck by lightning, blighted with locusts or dobbsed with leprosy? Rejoice therefore!
One of the many notable entries in this fortnight’s Circle is Steven Novella’s piece on the purported autism-mercury link (hint, hint: there isn’t one, Robert F. Kennedy and Tom Tancredo not withstanding). Dr. Novella also has two good posts on Michael Egnor‘s recent torrid affair with dualism, so if you’d rather get your materialism fix from a Yale University neurologist instead of a physics buff who never learns to lay off the sriracha sauce, there you go.
I’d like to take this moment to give special thanks to all the people who have added Science After Sunclipse to their regular web-surfing experience. In particular, I’ve noticed this little site appearing on some blagrolls in very august company, which makes me happy indeed.
Success as a Writer
I first tried writing a story when I was in the fifth grade. I kept going through the rest of elementary school, on into middle school and eventually joined the staff of Virgil I. Grissom High’s literary magazine. Sometime in that stretch, I wrote a story about discovering an abandoned alien city on Mars; it felt like a novel to me, but it was probably only about ten thousand words long. My bits and scraps of prose got good reviews from the literary magazine and the PTA. After long enough pleasing that audience, you inevitably wonder if you’ve got anything to say at all.
How, I wondered, does a writer tell that they’ve “arrived”? What’s the best and truest sign that you’ve “made it”?
John J. McKay provides an answer, perhaps unintentionally. When this is your fan mail, you know you’ve struck somebody’s chord:
Continue reading Success as a Writer
Meme-o-Rama: Top 10 SF Movies
OK, Chad and Rob have gotten into the act, so I might as well. What are the ten greatest science fiction movies of all time?
Remember, I’m the blogger. I make the decisions.
10. The Fifth Element — sure, it’s over the top, but that just means it cleared a high bar (and Milla Jovovich is an excellent addition to any Periodic Table).
9. Metropolis — at least as recently restored, it’s deep, complicated, character-driven and visually hardcore.
8. Forbidden Planet — Monsters! Monsters from the id! Nobody can be trusted, except maybe Robbie the Robot, ’cause he’s programmed with the Three Laws.
7. Brazil — there’s a reason paperwork labeled “Form 27B-6” suddenly started appearing in the MIT Student Services Center a few years ago.
6. Ghost in the Shell — the perfect mixture of philosophy and explosions.
Continue reading Meme-o-Rama: Top 10 SF Movies
Miffled
Miffled: it’s a perfectly cromulent word.