Links for 2011-06-01

"I experimented last week. I took off my hijab - the headscarf many Muslim women wear to cover their hair.
I have been wearing a headscarf when I leave the privacy of my home for 25 years, since I was 17. That's a long long time in human years.
I took my hijab off during a recent trip to Europe. I wanted to know what it would feel like. I wanted to know how people's perceptions of me would change and how my perception of myself would change."

"To say we had some goal with Clicky would be an overstatement.  But, if anything, we were kind of hoping to see some sort of Brownian motion.  We figured if we had lots of people pulling on the same dot, some kind of Brownian walk would show up.  This was grossly overestimating how many people actually view this blog and it turned out that most of the time Clicky was moved by one person at a time.  Anyway, what we did end up finding was more interesting than just a Brownian random walk...

Behold, in its full 133,000 point glory, Clicky!"

"One thing that fascinates me in physics is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics can be used to derive some important results in physics.  Some of them are rather technical (e.g. the relationship between the Einstein A and B coefficients, the Abbe Sine condition), but one is quite simple:  The impossibility of a one-way mirror.  (Explained below)  What fascinates me about all of these results is that thermodynamics and optics rest on completely different logical foundations.  There is, on the surface, absolutely nothing that connects optics and thermodynamics.  There certainly is a relationship between thermodynamics and photons, but the other phenomena (image focusing and mirrors) have, on the surface, almost nothing to do with thermodynamics."

The emotional cost of the Standard Model.