Links for 2009-08-01

"I just read the following in their Wikipedia entry: "In 2009, Boyz II Men announced plans for a new cover album, that covers 'artists I don't think people would expect us to cover!' according to Shawn Stockman." Can Popdose get in on this? Can we make a list of songs for Boyz II Men to cover? Because I want to start with "Detachable Penis" and just go downhill from there."

"There's also a lot of weird disrespect going on every which way, and somehow doesn't take into the fact that nobody who bothers to vote in the Hugos, much less even contemplate about the Hugos, is actually stupid, filterless, or thoughtless. They have their own reasons for picking what they did--reasons you may not understand and even hate. Again, it's culture. There are people who can analyze the intricate soap opera cycles of superhero comics with as much pizaaz as those of us who engage in mythopoeic play; there are those who can pick out the growth and development of story and character in Harry Potter as much as those who study the Golden Age classics of science fiction. Is it not enough that we fans are all, while disparate in opinion, still akin in our tendency towards taking many things as Serious Business?"

"I also very much love the aesthetics of the physical books themselves, and if/when electronic books finally displace the old paper copies it will be a sad day. But it could also be the dawn of the era that's been predicted almost since computers have been invented - the complete contents of the Library of Congress at your instant personal disposal. Two things stand in the way: copyright law and the limitations of technology.

For the moment let's ignore copyright law. That's a discussion for another day. Suffice it to say that copyright is fine and good conceptually, but the life of the author plus 70 years is simply an abomination. As a thought experiment we'll assume that either the law has been reformed or the Library of Congress has been exempted at least for archival purposes if not public access purposes. The question becomes whether it's possible to put the entire library in digital format."

"A subcommittee of the panel studied several possibilities, including NASA's current program to send astronauts back to the Moon by 2020, a more ambitious plan to skip the Moon and aim directly for Mars and what the members called the "flexible path," which would avoid the "deep gravity wells" of the Moon and Mars, saving the time and cost of developing landers to carry astronauts to the surfaces of those bodies.

Edward F. Crawley, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who headed the subcommittee, said, "The flexible path essentially goes across stepping stones" of progressively longer, more challenging missions by which NASA would learn how to operate long missions in deep space. "

"The purpose of the LIGO experiment is to search for gravitational waves in the universe. They haven't found any yet, but no good big-science experiment would be complete without a few cool spinoffs. They LIGO folks have an especially cool one: they've put a kilogram-sized pendulum and "cooled" it so effectively that it's almost in its quantum-mechanical ground state. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what this is good for, but it's really cool. Ha ha, little physics humor there, get it? "Cool.""

"Planck's blackbody radiation law, formulated in 1900 by German physicist Max Planck, describes how energy is dissipated, in the form of different wavelengths of radiation, from an idealized non-reflective black object, called a blackbody. The law says that the relative thermal emission of radiation at different wavelengths follows a precise pattern that varies according to the temperature of the object. The emission from a blackbody is usually considered as the maximum that an object can radiate.

The law works reliably in most cases, but Planck himself had suggested that when objects are very close together, the predictions of his law would break down. But actually controlling objects to maintain the tiny separations required to demonstrate this phenomenon has proved incredibly difficult."

"Students who entered college in 1995-96 and majored in a STEM field some time between then and 2001 earned a degree or certificate at a rate of 54.9 percent, compared to 50.6 percent for students who did not choose a science or technology major. Within science fields, the rates were highest for those in the physical sciences (68.4 percent), natural sciences (63.5), and mathematics (61.4 percent), and lowest for those in computer or information sciences (46.4). Fifty-three percent of engineering students earned a credential, but they were least likely among their STEM peers to earn a bachelor's degree (as opposed to an associate degree or certificate)."

"I have often thought that complexity classes could be viewed as our analog of particles in Physics. Really, I am not kidding. It is not April first. "