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Science-Nerd LEGO Ideas Gift Ideas

You know what LEGO is. Do you know what LEGO Ideas is? This is a program where people -- not normal people but Lego Ninja Expert people -- propose lego builds. The builds are normally actually built, but some are just designed or have parts that are just designed. These propose builds are then vetted on a publicly available web space at LEGO. People "support" the project by providing a very simple evaluation and, basically, a vote. If a proposed build gets 10,000 votes, it goes into review. I suppose the review process is important, or all future LEGO projeects would be about Boaty…

There's a hole in my spacetime! Or a string, or a wall...

"The whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent." -Douglas Adams As many of you know, if you take a whole bunch of mass, and you've got nothing going on except gravity, it's going to gravitationally collapse. And if atoms, nuclei, pressure, and nuclear reactions don't (or can't) prevent that gravitational collapse from running away, you're going to wind up with a black hole. But last week, I told you that if you took all the matter in the Universe and shaped it into a cylinder, you'd actually wind up with a huge cylinder of solid matter, as big…

Thank Your Lucky Star!

"A good heart is the Sun and the Moon; or, rather, the Sun and not the Moon, for it shines bright and never changes." -William Shakespeare Did I ever tell you how lucky you are? Lucky, indeed, to have the Sun for a star? Our Sun -- the ultimate source of all the light, heat, energy, and life on our world -- is remarkable in how constant it is. In fact, we didn't even know just how constant it was until we launched the SOHO satellite, shown below. SOHO has just released their results from more than 12 years of observing the Sun from space, and found that the size of the Sun has been constant…

Some inexpensive science related books

I know some of you cheapskates will want to pick up these books ... well, not really pick them up, but rather, instantiate them on your eReader. These are all 2 bucks or less for the Kindle version, at the moment, price presumably subject to change at any moment. How the mind might or might not work This is a collection of writings by various experts on how the mind works. They are not all right, but they are all intertesting. Includes Pinker, Lakoff, etc. Personally, I think there is a bit of a bias in the listing of authors towards a certain school of thought that I don't personally…

Making the Elements in the Universe

Earlier this week, I wrote about how the heavier elements in the Universe were made. Specifically, that they are made in stars. These stars then explode in a variety of ways, enriching the Universe with these heavy elements, and allowing us to form glorious things, like our planet! By contrast, the big bang makes light elements, but not heavy ones. Why is this the case, and how do we know? Let's find out. Image credit: Stephen Van Vuuren, created from a simulation of 80,000 star images. Just a few seconds after the big bang, the Universe is filled with protons and neutrons, in roughly the…

The Last 100 Years: 1919, Einstein and Eddington

100 years ago, the way we viewed our Universe was vastly different than the way we view it now. The night sky, with stars, planets, comets, asteroids, nebulae, and the Milky Way, was viewed to make up the entire contents of the Universe. The Universe was static, governed by two laws only: Newton's Gravity and Maxwell's Electromagnetism. There were the first hints that the Universe was made up of quantum particles, such as the photoelectric effect, Rutherford's first hints at the existence of the nucleus, and Planck's view that energy was quantized. But other than that -- and Einstein's new…

Galileo, the Leaning Tower, and Bull@%#$!

One of the simplest tricks you can use physics for is to figure out how high up you are. Either using a stopwatch or just by counting seconds, drop a dense object (e.g., not paper, a tissue, etc.) and figure out how long (in seconds) it takes from when you release the object to when it hits the ground. Take that number and square it. Multiply it by 16 to get your approximate height in feet, or multiply it by 5 to get your approximate height in meters. What's remarkable is that all objects fall at the same rate. All of them. It doesn't matter what material they're made out of, how large or…

Tunguska: 101 Years and 1 Idiot Later

One of the scariest things that could happen to Earth is to be bombarded with an asteroid or comet, as the potential for damage is incredible. Well, it turns out that we get hit by tiny "space pebbles" all the time. Every time you see a shooting star, like the one below, it's actually a very small rock, often the size of a mere grain of sand, streaking through the Earth's atmosphere and disintegrating. The heat of vaporization is so intense that the object glows brighter than the stars in the sky, and -- however briefly -- these grains of sand and dust can outshine even the planets. A…

How to Destroy the Entire Universe

Since the dawn of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. - C. M. Burns There's no need to stop at the Sun, though. Since yesterday was Earth day, I thought it was only appropriate to spend today telling you how not only to destroy the Earth, but to effectively destroy the entire Universe. To tell you this story, we have to go all the way back to the beginning, to just before the big bang. The big bang was when the Universe was hot, dense, full of energy, and expanding very quickly. The Universe was also spatially flat and the same temperature everywhere, and full of both matter and…

Telescopes 100 Years Ago: A Story

I was doing a little research into the history of telescopes, and it was about a century ago that they finally realized how much more potential light-gathering power reflecting telescopes had as compared to the older refracting telescopes. On Mt. Wilson in California, astronomer George Ellery Hale and optician George Willis Ritchey (back then everybody was named George -- look it up!) were embarking on a program to build large reflecting telescopes as the wave-of-the-future of Astronomy. But even before this telescope was operational, Hale and Ritchey were thinking of bigger and bigger…

What is Dark Energy?

You've all heard these words before. Dark Energy. But what is it, and why are we stuck with it? Let me start by telling you a story. Imagine, for a minute, that you have a candle. You know everything about this candle, including how bright it is and how far away it is from you. Like so: Now if I move this candle twice as far away, I know it's going to be one-fourth as luminous. If I move it three times as far away, I know it's going to appear one-ninth as luminous. And if I move it a thousand times farther away, I know what I see is going to be one-millionth as luminous as the original…

The Science of the Brightest GRB

Last week, the brightest gamma-ray burst ever was observed. (See here.) I wanted to know what it was that caused this bright explosion that, despite it being at redshift z=0.94 (or about 7.5 billion light years away), it was visible on Earth with the naked eye! Well, a scientific paper was written on the observations of this burst, named GRB 080319B, or the second GRB observed on 03/19/08. Let me take you through the highlights. First off, here's what it looked like, in gamma-rays (left) and the afterglow in the optical/UV (right): When we look from Earth, the faintest objects we can see…

A Testable Prediction about ID?

Some scientists from this blog attended the annual meeting of the American Society of Cell Biology recently and came across a poster by none other than Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute. For those who have not attended a scientific conference, a poster is a sort of second-level way of presenting one's research to colleagues at a conference. Most conferences will have addresses from members on various subjects, roundtable discussions in smaller groups, workgroups on professional issues, and a keynote symposium. In addition, there will be a large hall set aside at some point in the…

Buckingham Lies Under Oath in Dover

I said I was baffled by why the defense, of all people, would call former Dover school board member William Buckingham to the stand in the case, and here's why: he was in a no-win situation. He was the one quoted multiple times about wanting to balance out evolution with creationism in Dover's science classes, but he denied in his deposition that he had ever said such a thing: School board members Bill Buckingham, Sheila Harkins and Alan Bonsell and Supt. Richard Nilsen have, under oath, either said they have no memory of making the remarks related to creationism or denied making them. But…

I get email … from Michael Korn

The creationist fruit-loop du jour left another comment here in which he tried to taunt me with his proximity ("is Minneapolis-St. Paul close enough to Morris for you?") which wasn't very effective, since his IP address said he was commenting from a community college in North Carolina. And then he replied with more wacky comments: very good. you know how to analyze an IP address. you seem to think that i need to personally track you down. but no, its much simpler. i can rely on prayer to motivate the God you hate to destroy the godless heretic He hates. your name is jewish. thanks for being…

The JoMo Creationist Challenge, Take 2

In a posting last week, I discussed a challenge that has been made by Joseph Mastrapaolo to pretty much everyone he can find who defends evolution. After sending out this challenge and getting no response from scientists who have better things to do with their time than play JoMo's absurd little game, the True.Origins archive predictably posted an article crowing about the lack of response and claiming that those who were challenged were "debate dodgers" who knew they couldn't win. Here was the challenge: 1 The evolutionist puts $10,000 in escrow with the judge. 2 The creationist puts $10,000…

Your World View May Be Wrong

In response to a comment on my blog, I issued a snarky tweet (and repeated it on Facebook) to the effect that if your argument involves the phrase "World View" you might be wrong. This led to a number of light hearted but snarky, and often helpful, responses on Facebook and Twitter indicating that the term "World View" could mean a lot of different things, such as opinion, paradigm, or point of view. So I thought I'd expand on the concept a bit. In short, "World View" does not mean any of those things, and is in fact a term with a very weighty and rather specific meaning. The term is an…

"Belief" in Climate Change, The Weather, and Political Party

It seems that people "believe" in climate change (really, global warming in particular) when it it hot out more than at other times. And by "people" I mean the population in general. It turns out that Democrats don't change their position on climate change as the temperature outside changes (they already know it is real) and Republicans do a little (because it is true and a small number of them will put reality before politics). Meanwhile, those darn Independent voters who have somehow taken over our democracy for some very poor reasons (IMHO) wildly change their beliefs literally on the…

Amazingly cute new primate species in Borneo

The Slow Loris (Genus Nycticebus) is a category of prosimian (primates that are neither monkey or ape) that lives in southeast Asia. Most prosimian species live on the island of Madagascar, but there are several African and Asian forms, all of which are nocturnal. The Slow Loris is special because it is the only primate we know of that has a toxic bite. The total number of nocturnal primates known has increased considerably over the years and I'd wager there are many more to be found. “Technological advances have improved our knowledge about the diversity of several nocturnal mammals,”…

The Heartland Science Denial Documents and the Future of the Planet

The best available evidence now suggests that the most damning of the "Heartland Documents" -- the strategy memo which explicitly states that Heartland's strategy is to interfere with good science education in order to advance their political agenda -- is legitimate. The legitimacy of the document was being questioned because it was physically and stylistically different from the other documents with which it was released. We now know that the strategy memo was sent to climate scientist Peter Gleick and that Peter then took steps to acquire corraborating documents from Heartland (see "The…

Using Homeopathy To Treat Intestinal Woes, Domestic Violence, and Everything

I knew this guy, can't remember his name, who practiced a combination of naturopathy and homeopathy (they are different) along with a few other suspicious arts, back in the 1970s. Other than the white muumuu that he usually wore, I remember two things about him. I remember that a few years before I ever laid eyes on him, he drove his Volkswagen Bug to Mexico to go on a spiritual journey, and within one day hit and killed a cow, and spent six months in jail for this, and was released back into the United States at the border. And, I remember that he almost killed Joe. I have a friend, some…

Who Founded Greenpeace? Not Patrick Moore.

Who are the founders of Greenpeace? Not Patrick Moore. Patrick Moore is a Hippie for Hire. He makes the claim that he co-founded Greenpeace, and charges a fee to show up at conferences or other venues, or sit on boards, to provide a story that anti-environmentalists, global warming deniers, and others, like to hear. The part where he takes your money to lie, as far as I can tell, is true. The part about how he co-founded Greenpeace is apparently not true. Here’s what Greenpeace has to say about Patrick Moore: Patrick Moore. Did Patrick Moore found Greenpeace? Greenpeace says no. They…

We will not go quietly

I'm willing to read books by Simon Conway Morris, Ken Miller, and Francis Collins. I think they're dead wrong on the religion issue, but they are smart guys who contribute positively to the debate in other ways. I will also read Behe and Dembski and <gack, hack> Wells; they are not smart people, and they're wrong all across the board, but at least they're not trying to pretend they're my friend and are trying to help me, and I think it's a good idea that we should know the enemy. One fellow who infuriates me, though, and whose point of view I find difficult to comprehend, is Michael…

Go home, Arctic, You're Drunk.

If global warming is real, then why is it so cold? We are hearing this question quite often today and it will be asked many times by many people over the next few days as record low temperatures are set in many parts of the United States. Here in Minnesota, for example, we have a good chance of setting a record low daily high beating the previous record of 14 degrees below zero F. We may or may not beat the record daily low but we are going to get close. (Donald trump is probably the most famous person to have gotten this wrong over the last few days.) Global warming is real. The apparent…

Been Driving Refugees

In the past couple of months Sweden has started to receive large numbers of refugees from Syria, Iraq and a few other war-torn Middle-eastern countries. The ones who claim the right of political asylum are adequately cared for by the immigration authorities. But many don't claim that right. They may have more or less accurate information about other countries that offer better chances, so when they get off the train at Stockholm Central Station, they're basically tourists in the eyes of the law. And the municipality hasn't been able to care for them. Instead a major volunteer movement has…

EGU: Monday

Testing testing... is the EGU wireless network working? Yes. Good. Unlike the mike of the current speaker :-( Anyway, following a late (1 a.m.; flight delay, then the Ryanair coach took the backroads to avoid the motorway tolls; then dumped us on the outskirts of vienna) arrival at my hotel, and an early start (6 a.m. UK time; once again I forgot to pre-register; but this year the registration is very fast due to automation, even though I forgot my cosis-number) I get to the end of my parentheses... I mean I get to the conference. Its now a bright sunny morning. Usually I'd have checked the…

ERVs vs HIV-- Maybe a bad idea

For quite a while, now, there has been a connection between Endogenous Retroviruses and HIV. For some unknown reason, some of the young ERVs in humans, the ones that can still code for a protein here and there, are reactivated in HIV+ patients. Scientists have found ERV RNA in HIV+ patient plasma, and they have even found cytotoxic T-cells that target ERV proteins. HIVs controlled by HERVs This lead some scientists to believe that maybe, maybe, ERVs could be a good target for an anti-HIV therapy. HIV changes a lot. It is really hard to train your immune system to fight it. ERVs are 'human',…

Many roads lead to Rome-- HIV-1 Vif vs HIV-2 Vif

"HIV mutates a lot". People 'get' that. Why is HIV hard to stop? Why is HIV hard to treat? "HIV mutates a lot". But HIV does not mutate willy-nilly. It mutates at an evolutionarily defined rate. The reverse transcriptase enzyme makes mistakes during replication that are beneficial to HIV-- creating a diverse population, a quasispecies, that can 'answer' the multitude of evolutionary 'problems' the population faces. A homogeneous population would be wiped out by a particularly efficient antibody, or a targeting drug, but a diverse population means that somewhere in a population of billions,…

CSI: Virology

The best mysteries are ones where the reader, if they are following along carefully, can figure out the answer to the problem as the lead characters do. If you read science blogs and love evolution, then you know exactly where this is headed: Molecular evolution in court: analysis of a large hepatitis C virus outbreak from an evolving source. Lets say you are an epidemiologist, and youve noticed something peculiar-- numerous individuals have turned up with Hepatitis C infections. Well, people get HepC all the time, thats not noteworthy. BUT... there were a *lot* of people getting sick. Not…

Wrangling bad pop-science journalism

We all are familiar with the headlines: "SCIENTISTS SAY BROCCOLI CURES CANCER????" We all also know that pop-science articles are, functionally, useless.  Sometimes its editors manipulating article titles to make them more 'catchy', sometimes journalists trying to stir up controversy, sometimes its scientists and PR departments trying to oversell interesting (sometimes not so interesting) research. Average Joes and Janes cant peruse a science/heath/technology section and be confident in what they are reading. Does eating broccoli really cure cancer?  Does eating broccoli prevent cancer? Or is…

OKC add sexual orientation to nondiscrimination policy

Recently, several impossible events have happened here in Oklahoma City: 1-- 5.6 magnitude earthquake 2-- Abbie rides motorcycles 3-- OKC add sexual orientation to nondiscrimination policy END TIMES! END TIMES!!!!! Just last week, it was entirely legal for, say, an OKC fire department, not to hire someone because they thought the applicant was gay. It would not have been be legal for them to not hire someone just because they are female. It would not have been be legal for them to not hire someone just because they were Hispanic. It would not have been be legal for them to not hire someone…

The Uneasy Balance of Residential Academia

I mentioned this in the Links Dump this morning, but Timothy Burke's post on the inherent tensions in the residential part of small college life is really excellent stuff, and deserves more than the 1000 characters I can quote in Delicious: At Swarthmore this semester, for example, some students were deeply annoyed that the administration attempted to enforce a rule against parties between midnight and 2am on Thursday nights (or Friday mornings, to be more precise). Other students are this very minute angry that the administration has not acted more forcefully, rapidly or directly against…

It's Not Finished, It's Just Done

There was a nice piece at Inside Higher Ed yesterday on the myth of more time: A lack of confidence in one's abilities as a writer, researcher, speaker, etc. is at the root of the myth of more time. When a deadline looms, we become acutely aware of the imminent reception of our work by others. As graduate students, we often submit our work to advisors, etc. who are established scholars and who determine our progress towards a program milestone. Our awareness of this kind of appraisal, then, can be extremely pronounced as we work towards a deadline. As a result, we begin to doubt our abilities…

The Advent Calendar of Physics: Newton's Gravity

We kicked off our countdown to Newton's birthday with his equations of motion, so it seems fitting to close out the section on classical mechanics with another of Newton's equations, this time the Law of Universal Gravitation: Like all the other equations to this point, I'm cribbing this from the formula sheet for my just-completed intro mechanics class, which means it's in the notation used by Matter and Interactions. This is sub-optimal in some ways-- I prefer to have subscripts on the r to remind you which way it points, but I don't care enough to re-do the equation. So, this is the…

O Brave New-Media World That Has Such Bloggers In It

I've been incredibly busy this term, but not so busy I couldn't create more work for myself. Specifically, by writing an opinion piece for Physics World about the FTL neutrino business, that just went live on their web site: The result quickly turned into one of the most covered physics stories of the year, with numerous articles in magazines, newspapers and on television asking whether "Einstein was wrong". Just as quickly came numerous physicists denouncing the media frenzy, with Lawrence Krauss from Arizona State University and Cambridge University cosmologist Martin Rees both calling the…

Lev Grossman, The Magician King [Library of Babel]

Lev Grossman's The Magicians never got a full entry to itself, but as I said when I mentioned it in this round-up post, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's a magical school novel about recognizable American teenagers attending Brakebills, a sort of liberal arts college for the wizarding set, somewhere in the lower Hudson valley (presumably near the Lake of the Coheeries). It's not to all tastes, but it resembles my actual college experience a lot more than most other magical college novels, so I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's essentially impossible to say anything about the new sequel The Magician…

DAMOP Day 2

One of the odd things about going to conferences is the unpredictable difference between talks and papers. Sometimes, when you go to a talk, you just get an exact repetition of what's in the paper; other times, you get a new angle on it, or some different visual representations that make something that previously seemed dry and abstract really click. And, of course, sometimes you get new hot-off-the-apparatus results that haven't made it into print yet. Maddeningly, there doesn't seem to be any way to know in advance which of these things you're going to get from the title and abstract. It…

Practice Matters: "The effect of curriculum on Force Concept Inventory performance: A five thousand student study"

A few years ago, we switched to the Matter & Interactions curriculum for our introductory classes. This has not been without its hiccups, among them the fact that there has been a small decline in the conceptual learning gains measured by the Force Concept Inventory, the oldest and most widely used of the conceptual tests favored by the Physics Education Research community. We've spent some time discussing whether this is a temporary glitch, due to the transition, or something inherent in the curriculum. (Our numbers are small enough that these results remain at the level of plural…

Calendrical Innovation

Union operates on a trimester calendar, with three ten-week terms (September-November, January-March, April-June), rather than the two 14-15 week semesters used by most other colleges and universities. This has some advantages in terms of flexibility-- even science and engineering students get to take terms abroad, which is harder to swing in a semester system-- and some disadvantages in terms of scheduling-- we run much later than most other schools (the last day of classes is next Friday), which closes our students out of a lot of summer programs that begin in early June. As you can imagine…

Links for 2011-05-24

Is the Launch Speed in Angry Birds Constant? | Wired Science | Wired.com "Does the Bird's Launch Speed Depend on the Angle? If the bird is indeed shot from an elastic cord, then technically the bird should go faster when shot horizontally than when it is shot straight up. Why? Physics." (tags: science physics education blogs dot-physics games computing) The Clean Fossil Fuel? Natural Gas Under Fire | Txchnologist "The good news is that it seems the effects of methane gas can be limited through action by industry. But the economics of drilling, mediated by the actions of regulators, will…

The Tale of Little Red Robin Hood

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young girl from a family of modest means, who received a spiffy new jacket as a gift. It was bright red, and had a big warm hood that she could pull up over her head when she didn't feel like combing her hair. She was so pleased with this jacket that she wore it around all the time, even in the summer, and because of this, everybody called her "Red Hood," even her teachers. One day, she decided to go visit her grandmother, who lived on the other side of the deep dark woods. Her mother said, "As long as you're going to Grandma's house, take her this…

Are our high schools teaching evolution?

The Ecological Society of America has just published an article that surveys the state of science teaching in the US. Some of the results are somewhat reassuring — the majority of our college-bound high school students are at least getting exposed to evolution to some degree — but they're also getting taught creationism to an unfortunate degree. Here's the abstract to give you the gist of the story. How frequently and in what manner are evolution, creationism, and intelligent design taught in public high schools? Here, I analyze the answer to this question, as given by nearly 600 students…

Kant's cats

You're wondering - I know you are - about the unexplored connection between Kant and Cats. And I need to begin by disappointing you: this is not one of his. This is nameless cat from Vallouise whose only sin was to stumble into my viewfinder. I should continue by saying that I'm going to parrot Popper, because I think Popper has it right; and has explained something I've wondered about for a bit, viz why anyone takes Kant seriously3. Start, if you don't mind, with the usually moderately reliable Wikipedia, and ponder their Kant's antinomies page. It is, I hope you can agree, impossible to…

Physics Is For Eternal Five-Year-Olds

Yesterday's post about differences between intro physics and chemistry sparked an interesting discussion in comments that I didn't have time to participate in. Sigh. Anyway, a question that came up in there was why we have physicists teach intro physics courses that are primarily designed to serve other departments. It's a good question, and in my more cynical moments, I sort of suspect it's because engineering faculty are canny enough to outsource the weeding-out of the students who can't hack it in engineering. But I think there are good reasons, particularly at a liberal arts school like…

The year in stoats: 2014

I see I'm keeping up my habit of posts that are near-incomprehensible even to me after only a few months; its just like writing Perl. Anyway, here's my pick of the year, whilst we're in that grey quiet phase between Christmas and the New Year. Jan: Science (and the related Peer review) Feb: The idealised greenhouse effect model and its enemies. Or, if you prfer politics, my lack-of-prescience over the Ukraine. Mar: Investors warn of ‘carbon bubble’ as Shell predicts climate regulation will hit profits? Apr: septic.org? - not in itself desperately exciting, but I'll add it as a marker to what…

Conkered?

Not perhaps entirely fair - it is a cartoon, after all - but I liked it (nicked from the Times, if you were wondering). I also feel somewhat critical of Salmond: with his shiniest toy taken away he's chosen to walk off and leave others to sort out the mess. Perhaps. Is there a mess to be sorted out? (Timmy thinks there is but his analysis is poor) Right now it seems possible, with everyone desperately excited. That will probably soon pass. I was just going to leave you with The Gods of the Copybook Headings which has many relevant lines; and everyone can read their own mottoes into the words…

HIV Vaccines-- Time to give up?

No. But if you read last weeks article in The Independent on HIV-1 vaccine research, you might think otherwise. Here are my answers to The Independents questions. I have the luxury of answering these questions with more than a check mark, but be advised that my answers are tainted with the arrogance of youth, the benefit of hindsight, and obnoxiously high levels of optimism :P 1. Are you more or less optimistic about the prospects of an HIV vaccine compared to a year ago? OMG MOAR! This time last year I was so discouraged. This project Im working on for my PhD-- it might help lead to an…

Hillary Clinton Clinches the Nomination

The inevitable has now occurred. Barring something earth-shattering, Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee for President. She is the first woman to become the nominee of a major political party. In fact, she is the first woman even to be a serious candidate for President. In her speech tonight, Hillary took time out to make a gracious mention of Bernie Sanders and all that he has accomplished in his campaign. Her audience cheered. Bernie, for his part, made only a brief, classless mention of Hillary (making hey of the fact that it was she who called him). His audience booed…

Secularism and Social Justice

Sunday Chess Problem is taking this week off. We do have a topic for conversation, however. Richard Weikart is an historian at California State University, Stanislaus. He has made something of a cottage industry of blaming Darwin and evolution for the ills of the world, most famously in his book From Darwin to Hitler. His argument, apparently, is that poor Adolf Hitler was trying to understand the cause of Germany's decline, then he read Darwin and realized it was the Jews. The book was, understandably, savaged by more serious historians. If Weikart's intent was simply to elucidate the…

Sunday Chess Problem

Folks, I'm back from Atlanta. This trip was the meat in a travel sandwich that started with my brief visit to Indiana two weeks ago, and ends with my trip to New York on Wednesday. (I'm speaking at The Museum of Mathematics!) Busy, busy, busy. But not too bus to serve up a Sunday Chess Problem. This week we have another selfmate for you from Milan Vukcevich. This was composed in 1990 and calls for selfmate in three: Recall that in a selfmate white plays first and tries to force black to give mate in no more than the stipulated number of moves. Black, for his part, does everything in…