Links for 2009-11-02 : Uncertain Principles

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"Uncertain Principles" features the miscellaneous ramblings of a physicist at a small liberal arts college. Physics, politics, pop culture, and occasional conversations with his dog.

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Links for 2009-11-02

Category: Links Dump
Posted on: November 2, 2009 7:20 AM, by Chad Orzel

Boo! The optics behind "ghost" imaging « Skulls in the Stars

"Ghost imaging is in fact a fascinating and relatively new technique in which a detector can produce an image of an object that it cannot see! The physics behind this effect is somewhat subtle, and resulted in at least one minor controversy since its introduction. Let's take a look at it..."

(tags: science physics optics blogs skulls-in-stars)
nanoscale views: The unreasonable effectiveness of a toy model

"As I've mentioned before, often theoretical physicists like to use "toy models" - mathematical representations of physical systems that are knowingly extremely simple, but are thought to contain the essential physics ingredients of interest. One example of this that I've always found particularly impressive also happens to be closely related to my graduate work. "

(tags: science physics condensed-matter blogs natelson materials)
Chuck Klosterman's greatest fears | Books | The A.V. Club

"When you're young, the kind of person who's into slasher films are like metalhead kids and kids who are into Dungeons & Dragons and stuff. But as an adult, the only people who care about horror movies are academics. No one loves to talk about horror films more than somebody with a Ph.D. in cultural studies at a university. Every horror movie seems to be about penalizing people for values. There's a certain iconography of the vampire, a certain iconography of the werewolf, the zombie. That seems to be the core audience for slasher films--metalheads and collegiate professors."

(tags: music movies culture television avclub)
Good Dog, Smart Dog - NYTimes.com

"The matter of what exactly goes on in the mind of a dog is a tricky one, and until recently much of the research on canine intelligence has been met with large doses of skepticism. But over the last several years a growing body of evidence, culled from small scientific studies of dogs' abilities to do things like detect cancer or seizures, solve complex problems (complex for a dog, anyway), and learn language suggests that they may know more than we thought they did."

(tags: science biology psychology dog news)