Evelyn reminds me of just how much a theorist I really am. Go, read, enjoy, but do please save a little sympathy for the fellow back here choking on chalk dust.

At this moment, these are the most downloaded conference proceedings from the American Institute of Physics:

If you’re too lazy to click and embiggen, the second item is S. Rao et al., “Topic 1: Attracting Girls Into Physics” AIP Conf. Proc. 628, 9 (2002).

The third item is Chris Walter’s “Why understanding neutrino interactions is important for oscillation physics” (on the arXiv here). I worked in Chris Walter’s research group a couple summers ago; he’s a cool guy.

Being as it’s almost Friday and I’m not sure I’ll have time to post anything tomorrow, here’s some light and frivolous fare, now:

The cat in the picture is δ Carina. The gospel of the Ceiling Cat is written in the LOLCat Bible.

In the continuing debasement of every scientific word in the English language, today’s installment is the “Quantum Sleeper.” I would have thought this to be a Woody Allen biopic of Schrödinger, but no, it’s a bed — and one which takes the concept of pulling the covers over your head to new heights:

The basic Quantum Sleeper unit consists of an aluminum bed frame and headboard with polycarbonate, bullet proof plating that is designed to provide a protective barrier (shielding) between a perpetrator or environmental condition and the homeowners or occupants.

You also get a “bio-chemical filter in case of bio-chemical attack” and a rebreather system for doing without outside air.
Continue reading Quantum Sleeper →

Thomas Levenson contributes to the information overload by writing a thoughtful post about, er, information overload, and in so doing, he links to Gene Weingarten’s description of the day he buried himself in the “pundustry.” For the sake of the WaPo readers, Weingarten spent Valentine’s Day surrounded by six television sets, two radios and a laptop tuned into the political commentary streaming down through the æther.

Depravity ensues.

I can’t shake one particular impression which Weingarten’s stunt left me: Spider Jerusalem did the same thing, pretty much, in volume 2 of Transmetropolitan — but when Spider watched TV all day, lies were exposed, pundits’ careers were destroyed, and a cooking-show host tried to kill herself by leaping from the roof of a building.

This is fun. According to the Nielsen “BuzzMetrics BlogPulse” website (by Poseidon’s beard, they come up with goofy names these days!), the blog post in which PZ Myers told how he had been expelled from seeing the movie Expelled is now the fourth most popular on the entire Network.

Thanks to Paul Sims for spotting this.

In some parallel world, all publicity is good publicity, no matter how popular you already were or what your intended audience is. However, in that world, Nixon has been beatified, and Osama bin Laden is President of Earth.

It’s time to take the names of human actions in vain! The following post will contain the sort of language which, if you cared, would have made you stop reading my website already. Consider this item from sportswriter John Donovan:

Joe Torre met with George Steinbrenner for a nice lunch in Tampa the other day, and I’m sure at some point the subject probably turned to the Yankees. And George, I’d bet, at some point looked at his manager and said, “#$!&@* the heck?” The Yanks should be better. Can they win some close games?

Now, I don’t really give a flying $!%!#% about sports, unless there’s a chance that Boston will erupt in a riot. Then, I’m interested. However, linguistic peculiarities always get me perked up. Let’s look at that “#$!&@* the heck?” little remark. Everyone who grew up with comic strips knows about the convention of replacing swear words with punctuation symbols. Sometimes, the word being replaced is obvious to those familiar with modern slang; on other occasions, there’s a moderate ambiguity in the decoding. More unusual, however, is the case of an innocent word being obscured. Following comics convention, one would expect to see “What the #$!&@*,” but that’s not what we’ve got here. So, presumably, the proper decoding for Donovan’s remark would have to be. . . .
Continue reading Misplaced Obscenicons →

Like most people I know, this year I’ll be voting the straight “whom do I loathe least” ticket. Occasionally, I or a friend of mine felt a dram of enthusiasm about a candidate; all of them have vanished from the race, one by one. My expectation is that come November, my fellow Americans and I will have the privilege of pretending to choose which alleged human will be the next face of the parasite rasping and sucking all truth and decency from our country. However, the anonymous creativity of the Internet can still make me smile; for a brief, shining moment, this made politics something a little better than abject despair. Click to watch the animation cycle:

I figured out where it was going before it got there, which didn’t stop the LOL from working its way out of my belly.

My colleague Dion and I arrived at the Cambridge Brewing Company about ten minutes early for the PharynguFest. At the bar, we met Joshua and Rebecca; Dion was the one clever enough to realize what an Iowa State sweatshirt actually looked like, so we could identify Jeff, who was conversing with Liz, who had brought Ocho the puppet. Ocho tagged along with me for most of the evening.

All the pictures of me look irredeemably goofy. I don’t understand it: all I did was wear a stuffed octopus on my hat and a shirt from sexandscience.net. (Jeff says he wants one to wear when lecturing to his class. Ah, the perks of professordom.)

After our crowd had spent a while clogging up the aisle-ways in front of the bar and pulling people in from outside — “Judging from the octopus, this must be the Pharyngula meeting” — the hungriest among us got a table for four, which somehow became a table for six, at which eight people sat down. If you wanted to explain the decentralized nature of blogging, there’s probably a good metaphor in here somewhere. The eight of us then ate, drank and conversed, while the people back at the bar kept drinking (and maybe found tables of their own — they vanished into the night by the time we had eaten). As wrote Liz the PixelFish,
Continue reading Pharyngulation →

The infamous evilutionary superscientist P-Zed has been interviewed by a Korean newspaper in connection with a plagiarism incident which P-Zed’s legion of readers helped expose. The story in The Hankyoreh has not yet been published in an English version, but the Korean copy is available online.

A reader translates the headline as, “A plagiarism case spotted within 8 hrs since publishing: the Strength of Science Blogs.” (It actually took only a little over four hours for the first plagiarized passage to be detected; PZ Myers’s blog post appeared at 10:08 AM, and Ian York found the first of many stolen passages at 2:17 PM, ScienceBlogs time.) Google translates that headline as

After eight hours’ thesis plagiarism ‘OK, the power of science blog!

Machine translation, where would we be without you?

Sum 1 to N writes the following:

A math professor is proving some general theorem, and ends up with a result involving [tex]x[/tex]’s and [tex]y[/tex]’s. One student raises his hand and asks, “Can you show us a special case of that theorem?”. In other words, the student wanted a specific application of the theorem. The professor proceeds to erase the [tex]x[/tex]’s and [tex]y[/tex]’s and replace them with [tex]x_0[/tex]’s and [tex]y_0[/tex]’s. The student replies, “Ah! That makes more sense.”

As it is trivially obvious to the most casual observer, the extension of the theorem to [tex]x_1[/tex] and [tex]y_1[/tex] is left as an exercise to the interested reader.

And it will be on the test.

Upon realizing that, hey, more than a few of us seem to live in and around Boston, we Pharyngula readers started thinking about having a get-together — involving, of course, the consumption of cephalopods. MAJeff has kindly volunteered to do the organizing. If you’re interested, hop on over and let us know where you’d like to eat and what times you have available.