Links for 2009-10-20

"[U]ntil relatively recently, no one had ever actually done the experiment. It's difficult, both in terms of dropping the bullets properly and making sure the gun fires exactly horizontally. Horizontal fire is critical, because if there is an initial vertical velocity for the fired bullet, the equation will be different from the dropped bullet and they won't hit the ground at the same time. Nonetheless there is a group of experimenters who are very good at this sort of thing, and not so long ago they actually did the experiment. They are of course the Mythbusters."

"Today? Well, the AMA report names the film Land of the Lost as the chief menace seducing the nation's youth to the vile ways of tobacco. Land of the Lost. The biggest flop of the summer. Featuring a Will Ferrell character who is a pompous professorial ass. Who smokes a pipe as a sign of his pomposity. Why is the film the No. 1 cultural villain? Because you multiply the number of times smoking appears in a film by the number of people who saw it and the number tells you how many people's minds had impressions of smoking ground into them. "

"I am indeed disappointed that the talk is of hoaxes, conspiracies, perpetrators and the like, as if these words weren't of themselves editorial. I'm also disappointed at how breezily all these media outlets contribute to the gradual, intentional devaluation of skeptical thought. The Daily Show often frames this as an inherent problem with a 24-hour news cycle. My take is, if you have time to fill, why not include a full-throated expression of doubt that it's even physically possible for a boy to hide in that thing?"

2010 winners are Cirac, Wineland, and Zoller, for ion trap quantum computing.

"In the spirit of the many recent simple models of evolution inspired by statistical physics, we put forward a simple model of the evolution of such models. Like its objects of study, it is (one supposes) in principle testable and capable of making predictions, and gives qualitative insights into a hitherto mysterious process."

"Their efforts helped win a new day in court for Anthony McKinney, who has spent 31 years in prison for the slaying. But as they prepare for that crucial hearing, prosecutors seem to have focused on the students and teacher who led the investigation for the school's internationally acclaimed Medill Innocence Project.

The Cook County state's attorney subpoenaed the students' grades, notes and recordings of witness interviews, the class syllabus and even e-mails they sent to each other and to professor David Protess of the university's Medill School of Journalism."