Links for 2009-11-27

"Physicists in the Netherlands are the first to show that spin-polarized electrons can be injected into silicon at room temperature. The team injected the electrons into both p-type and n-type silicon and measured how long the polarization lasted. Although the lifetime was shorter than expected the physicists believe it is long enough to support the development of spintronics devices."

"[H]ere's hoping you find at least a few songs you've never heard before in this list of the 100 (okay, 103 -- we couldn't resist adding a few more) songs we loved the most over the last ten years. We're all rabid music collectors now, and no one's library is ever big enough -- and what's better for a real fan than the thrill of discovering something great? Happy listening!"

"Without question, the last decade has seen a massive shift in the way we collect music, with an emphasis on the collect - thanks to mp3s, music has become one big all-you-can-eat buffet, devaluing everything from bootlegs to boxed sets while changing the definition of "huge collection" from hundreds of CDs to tens of thousands of binary files. And it seems like we've all become aware of a lot more music, too -- this decade lacked a true superstar artist, but if you look back on the last ten years, chances are you'll remember a handful of songs you fell in love with by artists most people have never heard of. Top 40 is dead, and now you're the DJ.

Like our list of the decade's best singles, our albums list is a blend of the major and the obscure -- much like your own ever-expanding library, we imagine."

"Anyone looking for trends in our selection of the best books of the '00s might have a hard time finding them amid the wizards, 19th-century serial killers, dysfunctional families and such. Narrowing down our decisions was pretty tough, and the process required a number of back-and-forths about what was significant as well as beautifully executed, which book from a given author represented his or her best of the decade, and so on. So consider these alphabetically listed selections 30 of the many, many memorable books published this decade, and as always, let us know what we missed."

"This year we give thanks for one of the bedrock principles of classical mechanics: conservation of momentum. (We've previously given thanks for the Standard Model Lagrangian, Hubble's Law, and the Spin-Statistics Theorem.) There are analogous notions once we include relativity or quantum mechanics, but for our present purposes the version that Galileo and Newton would have recognized is good enough: in any interaction between bodies, the total momentum (mass times velocity of each body, added together vectorially) remains conserved.

Now, you might feel somewhat disappointed, thinking that conservation of momentum is important, sure, but not really cool and interesting enough to merit its own Thanksgiving post. How wrong you are!"

"A few years ago, Rolling Stone magazine added fuel to the music snobbery fire with its "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list. Anyone casually paging through the list would notice that the bulk of the list was comprised of songs from the 60's and 70's, just like the music snobs always say.

I, however, wasn't content with the casual analysis. So I punched the list into Excel, crunched some numbers, and found an interesting parallel between the decline of rock music quality and, of all things, the decline in US oil discovery and production"