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Blake Stacey is a physics boffin who wandered the Earth and eventually settled in the nation-state of Denial. He has written a science-fiction novel.

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June 29, 2009

Carnival of ye Elitist Bastards, Number the XIVth

Category: CarnivaliaElitist BastardryarXiv

I was remiss this month and didn't have anything of substance ready for the Carnival of the Elitist Bastards, partly because I've been busy in the shadows preparing a few items of Elitist Bastardry to last the ages. The current, fourteenth edition of the Carnival is now sailing the high seas.

Other items of interest:

Walter Lewin's 8.01: Lecture 1

Category: Classical mechanicsPhysicsUniversity educationVideo

I noticed a while back that the video recordings from Walter Lewin's introductory physics lectures are available via the Internet Archive's movie collection, which means that they can be embedded in the Blogohedron.

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.

June 28, 2009

It's Sunday Afternoon!

Category: Wobosphere Silliness

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.

I call it a "Hacking the Gibson".

June 22, 2009

Our Bruised Jacks Hung Up for Monuments

Category: VideoWobosphere Silliness

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.

June 15, 2009

AFB

Category: About this BlagPhysicsPopularizationVideo

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.

So long, Houston. Catch you on the flipside.

EDIT TO ADD:

OK, while I'm gone, you can amuse yourselves with the new "Rare Isotope Rap" from AlpineKat, creator of the infamous Large Hadron Collider song.

Via Symmetry Breaking.

June 14, 2009

BBC Reporter's Science Education Abducted by Aliens

Category: AstronomyPopularizationPseudoscience

Spotted on the BBC website, under the headline "The truth about Roswell?"

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.

Yes, there was a lake, now known as Lake San Agustin, covering that region in the Pleistocene. For the rest. . . well, I'm glad that proposal to drastically increase the speed of light to ease intergalactic travel was implemented successfully!

(Credit and blame duly apportioned to ZK.)

June 11, 2009

Fascinating

Category: University educationWobosphere Silliness

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. . . .

Pubget: A New Interweb Toy for the Life Sciences

Category: Open AccessSoftware

"Pubget: ze search engine for ze PDFs from ze life-science journals, yes."

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.

According to Bio-IT World's writeup,

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.

Try it out and see how well it works, I suppose.

(Via.)

HOWTO: Become Very Rich by Writing Books

Category: BibliophiliaSoftwareWobosphere Silliness

I'm glad to see that the procedure has been spelled out.

To become rich very fast by writing books, you have to take these steps.

1. Start writing novels on your computer. Write fiction novels since they take the least amount of time. But at first they won't bring in much money.

2. When you write your skill will automatically advance. If your skill is high enough you will be able to write more novel types/genres.

Skills automatically advance? Awesome! But wait, there's more:

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