Links for 2009-08-17

"This was an art exhibition -- a term that perhaps conjures a more subdued event. But the art in this show, called "Those About to Die Salute You," involved humans in motion, boats on water and those tomatoes. It was the creation of Duke Riley, whose work skews aquatic and unpredictable: He once built a wood and fiberglass submarine, floated it too close to the Queen Mary 2 and was arrested.

His vision for Queens on Thursday night was a Roman-style staged naval battle among representatives of museums in four New York boroughs, who would face off in teams in the reflecting pool, paddling in boats built from recycled materials like reeds and salvaged Styrofoam. "

"I have come to the conclusion that socks are fermions, and that this explains much of the behavior of disappearing socks. (There may be other factors at play, of course) Clearly they are not bosons; you cannot make two socks occupy the same space: Put two socks on the same foot and they wll be layered, and there is a finite number you can fit into a washing machine or a dryer. Socks worn in the normal fashion are distinguishable by being on the left or right foot (or hand, in the case of the sock puppet effect; I won't be discussing the very interesting Lamb-Chop-shift one can observe). The individual socks in a pair, however, are indistinguishable and they must have an antisymmetric wave function and thus obey Fermi-Dirac statistics and follow the Pauli exclusion principle."

Aldous Huxley vs. George Orwell, in convenient cartoon form.

"This is what makes the difference between the population at large and the scientific community. Everything is political in public. Even science. If the Discovery Institute were launching a politicaly savvy attack on gravity, would the Large Hadron Collider be on the defensive? Would intelligent falling be on the cover page of major newspapers in the US?"