Links for 2009-10-04

"A new wave of posthumous books by iconic authors is stirring debate over how publishers should handle fragmentary literary remains. Works by Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron, Graham Greene, Carl Jung and Kurt Vonnegut will hit bookstores this fall. Ralph Ellison and the late thriller writer Donald E. Westlake have posthumous novels due out in 2010. "

"Boeing has unleashed it's ATL (that's Advanced Tactical Laser aircraft) on an unsuspecting truck and captured video for all of us to enjoy. Check out the link below for video of this impressive piece of equipment burning a hole in a 1ft square target on the hood from the vantage point of the truck, or the aircraft."

"Ultracold atoms are still too hot. This may seem a ridiculous claim--after all, the low-temperature exploits of the purveyors of quantum gases are notorious. Laser cooling can flash-freeze atoms to temperatures in the micro- and nanokelvin range. In the mid 1990s, researchers followed this with evaporative cooling of atoms out of shallow traps and made the first gaseous Bose-Einstein condensates appear at temperatures of 20 nK [1]. With slow and careful cooling by decompression, quantum gases have plummeted to as low as 500 pK [2]."

A book that's getting a lot of positive buzz, whose description doesn't sound like my kind of thing, but that's what free samples are for...