Links for 2009-10-02

"Cosmic rays constantly bombard earth's atmosphere at a rate of about 100 per square meter per second, but they don't make it through intact. They collide with atmospheric molecules, setting of a cascading shower of secondary particles, such as neutrinos and muons. Researchers probably wish there was less stuff between us and them; because they're messengers from the deep, so to speak, they could offer clues to black holes and supernova. But most of what eventually reaches the ground is very low in energy; above the energy of 10^20 eV, only one cosmic ray falls on a square kilometer of ground in a century, meaning that cosmic ray observatories must span huge swaths of land. The Pierre Auger Observatory, an array of 1,600 water tanks on the Argentine Pampas that catch the secondary particles and confuse cows, covers an area greater than that of Paris."

"If, on the other hand, how we argue matters, the standards for evidence matter, if the point is to maintain some kind of rigor when we're considering collective action or making public decisions, then it needs to matter even when you're hearing a message that's otherwise appealing to you. You can't get away with privately supplying the serious evidence that you personally know about if that's wholly lacking from the polemic in question, or taking out odious manipulations in favor of imagined probity. "

"We were supposed to clean up three items of garbage in a park and get rid of a fly. It turns out that your character can just pick up two of the items of garbage and the fly himself, leaving only an item of garbage high up in a tree. So I thought, let's get God involved. I type God and he dutifully appears. God in this game appears to take the position that he helps those who help themselves, so he just wanders around enjoying the park. "

"It's one of the most vivid memories of my high school years. I'm dozing on my kitchen floor, surrounded by a debris of screwdrivers, scrap wood, ball bearings, nails, old cardboard boxes, springs, wood glue, wire hangers, and lots of duct tape. My dad nudges me in the side with his slippered foot. "It's three o'clock in the morning," he says. My cheek is squashed against the cool tile floor. I crack an eye open and see my nemesis: the golf ball that, in just a few hours, I'm supposed to somehow raise six feet in the air, in ten steps, for my physics final project."

Just what the title promises.

"The Lindau Meetings are commemorating the 100th birthday of their co-founder, Count Lennart Bernadotte (1909-2004) with the launch of a project in science history: lectures held by Nobel Laureates over the past six decades at the meetings in Lindau will be digitalized and made accessible online. This project has been made possible by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. The eleven lectures above are the first ones to be presented. More insights by Nobel Laureates will follow."

"Because of the success of last year's inaugural Guess-A-Nobel Contest, we decided we'll repeat this event annually until there is no more science worthy of the prize. This year we're giving out three 8GB Apple iPod Touch devices to those who correctly guess in each of the three science categories."