Click here to open a transcript of the above lecture in a new window.
And, talking of physics videos, I hear that Bill Gates just recently bought the rights to Feynman's Messenger Lectures, the ones which became the book The Character of Physical Law (1965), and plans to make them available ontube for free. That'll be nice.
And you know what that means — time to wake up, see whose last names you can remember, and figure out how to dispose of the alcohol left over from the night before!
The ne plus ultra of scientific drinks is, of course, the Buzzed Aldrin (TANG made with vodka). It may be more convenient — and, in light of recent events, it is certainly fitting — to prepare a Stuart Pivar instead: mix the TANG powder with water according to standard operating procedure, then combine it with whatever cheap booze you have on hand, mixing the ingredients inside a rubber balloon. Best served with endorsements from people who have not actually tasted it.
If you have gin readily available, and if you can find a Martini glass among the debris, you could try the following:
Pour the gin into the Martini glass. Put Orbital's "Halcyon And On And On" on the stereo. Set your desktop background to a picture of Antonio Benedetto Carpano, the inventor of vermouth, after running the picture through the "invert" and "posterize" colour filters of a graphics program. Add a pickled onion. Drink.
Still gone. Have this week to teach Shannon information theory to management types who haven't seen a logarithm since high school and hated it then. Drink for me. Meanwhile. . . .
Sir Ian "You can call me Serena" McKellen instructs us how to change a car tire. The interviewer is supremely annoying, but starting at the two-minute mark, it's all worth it:
This man needs to star in a movie with Guitar Wolf.
I will be spending time away from the Blogohedron this week, due to circumstances I am not yet at liberty to disclose. Lucky, that, as it makes my life sound satisfyingly cloak-and-dagger.
There is a lunar quality to the landscape of New Mexico which seems somehow appropriate for a state which is our portal to the heavens.
It is here on a dried-up lake bed high above sea level that the radio telescopes of the US government's Very Large Array (VLA) send signals to the outer edges of our expanding universe, chasing the very moment of the Big Bang through the trackless void of time and space.
Visit #135,970 logged by my blog's SiteMeter account (a more-or-less arbitrary index) was for someone in the Sidney-Pacific graduate dormitory searching Google for {getting laid at mit}. Well, I suppose if Google can find you everything else. . . .
I've said on occasion that the surest way to convert a scientist to a fervent Open Access advocate is to lock them for a week in a place with Internet access but no journal subscriptions. In mathematics and physics, we've got the arXiv, so we can typically get some version of most anything published since the mid-1990s or thereabouts, although it might not be the version of the article which actually survived peer review (and was thus shown "not obviously wrong, not obviously redundant and not obviously boring"). Retrieving papers in the biological world is more exasperating. And, to rub it in, even when you're sitting in a building whose WiFi belongs to an institution which has a subscription to the journal you're trying to read, actually downloading the damn PDF requires clicking through extra hoops. A tool to automate this process is a good idea.
What this means is that when scientists use Pubget to search by author for example, the results are delivered in the form of the full-text PDF, without having to navigate through abstracts or publisher's electronic portals. "The end user sees us in two ways," says Jones. "If they are not associated with a larger institution, we are the most thorough resource for free full-text documents. We not only have everything that's in PubMed Central and the other free resources, but we spider the web for other full-text documents that happen to be out there. If you're at an institution, we're the fastest way to take advantage of the subscriptions your institution has provided for you."
Pubget offers various links for functionality, including a Firefox plug-in to download PDFs; access to the publishers' web page and the equivalent page in PubMed; email forwarding; and tagging (using a virtual cloud-based storage system) to metatag articles and keep them in a 'locker.' A widget, which works via RSS, allows continuous updates on topics or authors inside a lab web page.
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