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The Greatest Story Ever Told -- 05 -- Matter vs. Antimatter

For every one billion particles of antimatter there were one billion and one particles of matter. And when the mutual annihilation was complete, one billionth remained - and that's our present universe. -Albert Einstein Welcome back to our series, The Greatest Story Ever Told, where we're recounting the physical history of the Universe, from before the big bang up through the present day. We're currently in a hot, dense, expanding Universe, filled with equal parts matter and antimatter, bathed in radiation, and it's been only a tiny fraction of a microsecond for all of this to happen. But…

Why I am dissatisfied with NASA's Constellation

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time. -T.S. Eliot Yesterday, President Obama delivered his first State of the Union Address, and talked about a number of things that ranged from inspiring to disappointing. But one thing that didn't make it into the address was the rumor that NASA's Constellation program (including the Ares Rocket designed to launch crews) will lose their government funding. (Please note: what follows is my opinion, and I take responsibility for it.) If this actually…

Q & A: Can We Clone a Woolly Mammoth?

What? Is this a joke, Ethan? Have you been watching Jurassic Park again, drinking Dino DNA or something? No, I got an interesting question from startswithabang.com reader and ichthyophobe Lucas: Over the years a few intact, frozen woolly mammoth have been found and procured by different scientists and governments, most recently Japan. What are they doing with these ancient popsicles? Cloning? Could a frozen woolly mammoth be effectively cloned? Aaah, the woolly mammoth, something we think of as ancient, but really it only went extinct an estimated 3,700 years ago, with the last mammoths dying…

The Cosmic Microwave Background? Not always…

The Universe isn't a static place. Although the laws of nature (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) don't appear to change over time, everything in the Universe appears to evolve, and changes over time. One of the simplest ways that this happens is through Hubble expansion. General relativity tells us how the Universe expands, and more specifically, it tells us that the expansion rate (which we call the Hubble constant, H0) is related to the total energy density of the Universe. More matter density: faster expansion. Greater density of photons (i.e., light): faster expansion. More of any and…

My Favorite Things: Comedian

As a former stand up comic, I get asked a lot who my favorite comedians are. I tend to like dark, edgy humor more than anything else, and if it's got a real identifiable view of the world attached to it, so much the better. I think the best comic working today is Doug Stanhope. Whether you agree with his views or not, he has them, and he's not afraid to give them to you in the most pointed way imaginable. Back in the late 80s/early 90s, there was a huge comedy boom. Every network and cable channel seemingly had their own stand up show - Evening at the Improv, Comedy on the Road, the Half…

How many countries have ever had a woman leader?

First, a little Benazir Bhutto story, since we are on the subject of women leaders. A friend of mine was to be on the podium of Harvard's graduation the year Benazir Bhutto was to give the keynote, and heard this conversation. John Galbraith, the economists who was also a professor at Harvard, Bhutto's former undergraduate advisor, and her friend, was also to be on the stage, and all the famous people who were to be on that stage were to walk out in procession. The Secret Service, who were protecting Bhutto who at the time was Head of State, arranged the people so that two or three guys,…

No new nose neurons?

Elizabeth Norton has an interesting write-up in Science Now. Some years ago, after a long period of suspicion, it was seemingly demonstrated that neurogenesis (the formation of new neurons) happened in the human nose. This research was based on the identification of proteins that would be associated with the early formation of baby neurons. Therefore, it was not possible to prove that full grown and functioning neurons were being grown in the nose, but it was assumed to be a reasonable possibly. However, it really isn't a reasonable possibility. If there was an Intelligent Designer, then…

My baby was designed by god just like a banana

When my baby nurses from his mom, he can see her face and bond with her because he was designed to do so by god. Like how a banana is designed by god to fit comfortably in the hand for eating, or maybe just carrying around. What am I talking about? (A timely repost) Imagine the following two alternative scenarios. Alternative Universe One The Scene: Visiting Nurses Inc. VNI contracts with health care providers to send trained visiting nurses around to check in on newly minted babies and their parents. This is standard procedure in many health care plans, and of course, VNI wants to…

How to make gravy

You've got your turkey all planned out, and you've got some stock. Now, it's time to explore the true meaning of Thanksgiving. Gravy. (And maybe something to put it on.) I will tell you how to make excellent gravy with no stress and guaranteed success. Without lumps. I don't do recipes. I do theory. But this theoretical approach will get you through. Its very simple. You are going to need the following: A stick of butter or two, and an equal volume of regular flour. You can use special fancy dancy flour if you want, but that is not necessary. Several cups of a liquid such as stock.…

The Boy Scouts Suck

When I was a kid there were no boy scouts. Well, there were, but not exactly where I lived. There were cub scouts and I was a member, and older kids in my neighborhood were boy scouts, but then somehow when it came time for me to leave the Cub Scouts and join Boy Scouts, they had mysteriously disappeared, so instead, I joined a different group, the Young Marines. We Young Marines ate boy scouts for snacks. [ADDED: I've noticed that this petition is getting signatures at a rate of hundreds per minute.] But anyway...I actually have very little sympathy for people who join the Scouts and…

Climate-Contrarian Research: Rebutted by Peer Review, Soaked Up by MSM

Given recent attention to the issue of consensus in climate change research, this is a good time to mention a paper that came out recently by John Abraham, John Cook, John Fasullo, Peter Jacobs, Scott Mandia and Dana Nuccitelli called "Review of the consensus and asymmetric quality of research on human-induced climate change." I'll paste the abstract below but first I'll summarize it in a sentence. The few papers that explicitly deny the basic science of climate change are rightfully rejected by the peer review process because they are crap. Bit they do find more attention by main stream…

The Lake That Ate Santa Claus (and some bad reporting?)

OK, so supposedly a fresh water lake has appeared at the North Pole and it is ENORMOUS and Santa Claus has been missing since and is presumed dead. OK, not really. The Giant Lake is really just a "pond" of meltwater on top of the polar sea ice, on the North Pole. But wait, actually, it is not really at the North Pole, it was photographed by some scientists who hang around the North Pole but this pond, which is small but was photographed with a wide angle lens, isn't really exactly at the North Pole anyway, and these ponds form there all the time in the summer. But really, even though they…

How to use the Gym to attain your personal fitness goals

... Continued ... I had promised a few pointers regarding using the gym experience to become fitter or maintain fitness. Do not use my advice without consulting a doctor first. Everybody who does anything should do so only on advice of a doctor. I wonder if anyone has ever done that (consulted their doctor). I imagine the doctors must be pretty busy with this sort of thing. Anyway, what I have learned from Lenora, books, and experience: You should do exercises in a certain order, and this order can be conceptualized at different scales of time. The very first muscles you should work on,…

Shades of Dr. Jones

I've read Marilyn Johnson's forthcoming book Lives in Ruins. Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble. It's a collection of lively and enthusiastic portraits of contemporary archaeologists in their professional environment. Some may find the tone a bit too enthusiastic, pantingly so in parts, but that's a matter of taste. Archaeologists should arguably be thankful to have a friend like Marilyn Johnson. Still, she's an outside observer of our tribe, and she approaches us from a very particular direction. Take her introductory statement that “Field school … usually takes place in a…

Oh good lord: Sanjay Gupta and personal protective equipment

Some time last Tuesday, that strange sound you heard was thousands of scientists screaming in agony, and smashing their heads against the nearest keyboard/desk/wall. Good lord, Sanjay. Good lord. What is wrong with you? This video is like the scientific equivalent of 'Two girls one cup'. After you saw it, youd run and show your friends, just to see them writhing in horror. "What is this now? Why are you taping my reaction? Okay. Huh. I dunno... I dunno... Wait. What is he doing with the chocolate sauce?.... No. NO! OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! WHY??? AHHHHHH!!! WHAT IS HE DOING???? AHHHHHH!!! WHY…

Where do the hagfish fit in?

Hagfish are wonderful, beautiful, interesting animals. They are particularly attractive to evolutionary biologists because they have some very suggestive features that look primitive: they have no jaws, and they have no pectoral girdle or paired pectoral fins. They have very poorly developed eyes, no epiphysis, and only one semicircular canal; lampreys, while also lacking jaws, at least have good eyes and two semicircular canals. How hagfish fit into the evolutionary tree is still an open question, however. There is a strong temptation to see hagfish as representing an earlier grade of…

HERVs and HIV-1

Quick recap of ERVs for new readers of ERV (or long-time readers who have forgotten!)-- ERVs are retroviruses that accidentally infected an egg/sperm cell, and became a permanent part of that egg/sperms DNA. That egg/sperm then went on to successfully generate a viable embryo, and because that retrovirus was part of the egg/sperms DNA, it also becomes a permanent part of the organisms DNA. Though this is a very very rare, totally accidental event, on an evolutionary time-scale, random events have happened quite a few times, to the point where a large chunk of your, *your* DNA, is…

The Evolution of Random Comfort Food

One of the slighter slight flaws in my character is an unaccountable fondness for bad Americanized Chinese food. When I go to Starbucks to write, I walk right past a Chinese buffet restaurant, and it's a real effort not to run in and overdo it. I occasionally try to cook stuff in this general category at home, with fairly mixed results. One thing that I've often tried to do at home is fried rice, with fairly mixed results, mostly because I don't generally have the right kind of rice on had (we mostly use medium grain rice from the "Hispanic" section of the supermarket, for no really well…

The Advent Calendar of Physics: Schrödinger

Newton's birthday (in the Julian calendar) is Sunday, so we're in the final days of the advent calendar. Which means it's time for the equations that are least like anything Newton did, such as today's: This is the Schrödinger equation from non-relativistic quantum mechanics. If you want to determine the quantum state of an object that's moving relatively slowly, this is the equation you would use. It also has probably the greatest origin story of any of the equations we've talked about. Or at least the most salacious origin story of any of the equations we've talked about... Erwin…

The Advent Calendar of Physics: Ampère and Maxwell

To end this week, we wrap up electricity and magnetism with the fourth and final of Maxwell's equations. this one includes Maxwell's own personal contribution to these: This is sort of the mirror image of Faraday's Law from yesterday, with the curl of the magnetic field on the left, and stuff related to a change in the electric field on the right. There are two terms instead of just one on the right, though, because when you're dealing with electric fields, you can get a change in the field in two ways: by changing the field directly, or by moving charged particles around. The first term…

What Advantage Do "Insiders" Offer?

Out in Minnesota, Melissa expresses some high-level confusion over the preference for people with a small-college background: In the past few months, I have been involved in several conversations where someone mentioned that a particular faculty member or administrator was or was not an alum of a small liberal arts college (SLAC) in a manner that seemed to suggest their status as a former student of a SLAC (or not) clearly explained why the individual took the particular action or made the particular decision being discussed. (Generally the tone of the discussions has been that "good"…

Overthought Reviews of Genre Fiction

One of the perils of book reviewing, or any other form of literary analysis is putting more thought into some aspect of a book than the author did. It's one of the aspects of the humanities aide of academia that, from time to time, strains my ability to be respectful of the scholarly activities of my colleagues on the other side of campus. And it frequently undermines reviews of books that I've already read. A couple of good examples come from this Paul Di Filippo column for Barnes and Noble, where he reviews two books I've read, and one I haven't. I haven't actually read his comments on the…

What Counts as "Quantum Physics?"

In comments to yesterday's post about precision measurements, Bjoern objected to the use of "quantum mechanics" as a term encompassing QED: IMO, one should say "quantum theory" here instead of "quantum mechanics". After all, what is usually known as quantum mechanics (the stuff one learns in basic courses) is essentially the quantization of classical mechanics, whereas QED is the quantization of classical electrodynamics, and quantum field theories in general are quantizations of classical field theories. I think saying "quantum mechanics" when one talks about something which essentially has…

Trump's EPA pick will make Obama regret his environmental overreach?

Via someone else (Gavin, perhaps?; his tweet is relevant) - I certainly don't read The Hill regularly - comes Trump's EPA pick will make Obama regret his environmental overreach by evil arch uber-villain Patrick Michaels. A quick search shows me not having much to say about PM; I seem to have left that to Eli (but that was waay back in 2006); there's also Tim Lambert, who certainly isn't keen; and I side-swipe PM in 2013 over some silly sea level graph. Anyway, the piece can be taken as an indication of what PM thinks the Trump administration is likely to do, though there is no suggestion of…

Asking Questions and the "Finkbeiner Test"

There was a lot of re-sharing yesterday of an article about the "Finkbeiner Test" to be applied to profiles of women scientists. This is analogous to the "Bechdel Test" in pop culture, which asks "Do two women talk to each other about something other than a man?", only because we're scientists, it's more complicated, hitting seven points: To pass the Finkbeiner test, the story cannot mention The fact that she’s a woman Her husband’s job Her child care arrangements How she nurtures her underlings How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field How she’s such a role model for other…

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

So, a couple of months ago, I said I was taking some time off from the blog, and wasn't sure I would make it back. What was up with that, anyway? Well, for one thing, I had a bunch of stuff to work on, and needed the extra time. I wrote a proposal for a third book that's being shopped around now, about which I won't say anything other than that it doesn't involve Emmy. (She's taking it in stride. As long as she gets treats and belly rubs, we're cool.). I also wrote two papers, posted to the arxiv: first, Searching for New Physics through AMO Precision Measurements: We briefly review recent…

An Account of the Lund University Creationism Debate

This past Sunday the Department of Archaeology at the University of Lund organised a public debate about creationism and archaeology. One of the invited speakers was Young Earth creationist Mats Molén, who should not in my opinion have been lent academic credibility in that manner. Universities should teach students about pseudoscience and why it is not science, but they should not let pseudoscientists teach. Lund is far from my home and I didn't attend the event. But I wrote the non-creationist participants beforehand and suggested that they familiarise themselves with creationist debate…

No growth stimulation of tropical trees by 150 years of CO2 fertilization but water-use efficiency increased

As an experiment, I thought I'd try posting some science instead of nonsense or mountains. From Nurture (Peter van der Sleen et al., Nature Geoscience 8, 24–28 (2015) doi:10.1038/ngeo2313): The biomass of undisturbed tropical forests has likely increased in the past few decades1, 2, probably as a result of accelerated tree growth. Higher CO2 levels are expected to raise plant photosynthetic rates3 and enhance water-use efficiency4, that is, the ratio of carbon assimilation through photosynthesis to water loss through transpiration. However, there is no evidence that these physiological…

The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 83

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 82 Table of Contents Chapter 84 Chapter 83 The World Park, December 3, 2059 The next UNGETF meeting opened like an autopsy. Peter started with a catalogue of the destruction wrought at the L1 point. "The command centre has been destroyed, as have several dozen of the 1 km. sunshields. But there were more than 2,000 of them, so a sizeable number still exist. Some were damaged by flying debris; many were not." "Some factions have expressed a desire to repair and rebuild the cluster; however, with the AU forbidding financial support, Group 5 has…

Radio Report: Brayton vs. Klayman

I don't know how many of you got to listen to my appearance on the Jim Babka show tonight, but here's my take on how things went. First, I was absolutely stunned by how bad Larry Klayman was. I mean awful, stink-up-the-joint horrible. Totally unprepared, ignorant of the facts of the case, thin-skinned, cranky. It was really a pathetic performance. Every argument he made save one was an ad hominem, and the one that wasn't was completely false. Rather than discuss the actual legal record and whether Judge Greer ruled incorrectly on anything in the case, he just ranted about how judges are…

Making Gay Rights a Laughingstock

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I stand shoulder to shoulder with a lot of good people, gay and straight, in being staunchly in favor of equal rights for gays and lesbians. Like any large group, however, gay rights advocates have our share of people who take things to such ridiculous extremes that they give ammunition to those who oppose equality. A perfect example is the recent uproar started by the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance (BGLTSA) at Harvard, who are up in arms over a presentation by actress Jada Pinkett Smith. Why are they upset? Not because Smith…

Barbara Forrest on a New ID Book

Barbara Forrest has written a review of the book Darwinism, Design and Public Education, written by John Angus Campbell and Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute. Predictably, the DI Media Complaints Division (otherwise known as the DI Blog) is howling in outrage. Just as predictably, their basis for that outrage is a highly dishonest portrayal of what Forrest writes. It begins: Barbara Forrest is at it again. In her latest review of Meyer & Campbell's Darwinism, Design & Public Education Forrest substitutes strident affirmation for science and scorn for reasoned argumentation.…

Sometimes, fence-sitting is the domain of the crazy, too

The fundamentalist nuts in this country leave us goggling aghast at the lunacy they propagate, but man, some of the in-betweeners are almost as creepy—and I get to pick on somewhere other than America! This page on the "noble lie" brings up the Straussian hypocrisy that many confused pro-religion people are supporting in the UK — we have to support faith to keep the masses placid. Many of those who support religious belief agree with Plato. It is not important that religion is a lie - the important point is that the people believe in it and that this belief maintains social order and moral…

The New lluminati

Since politics today is conducted primarily through the use of catchphrases and codewords, political memes are particularly fun to watch and never more than when they're first beginning to enter the public discourse. The right has long been the master of this art, building on the direct mail campaigns of Richard Viguerie and, later, Newt Gingrich's famous list of words to use when making political speeches. Particularly interesting are those codewords and phrases that really just mean "Them - everything we despise". For instance, the favorite buzzword of the religious right, beginning in the…

More Conservative Bloviation on Specter

I'm finding this story absolutely remarkable, have you noticed? It's just astonishing to me watching this coordinated campaign of stupidity and lies being thrown at Specter. The latest is this letter from a group calling itself, ironically, "Frontiers of Freedom" and signed by a bunch of obscure right wing think tank bosses. Like the articles by the National Review editors, Robert Novak and Donald Wildmon, this one is just chock full of lies and distortions. Some of the loonier claims: The nation's protest against Democrat obstruction of qualified nominees added to this year's huge voter…

Did God Intervene to Elect Bush?

A lot of evangelicals seem to think so: "This was Providence," evangelical leader and presidential adviser Charles Colson told Beliefnet. "Anybody looking at the 2000 election would have to say it was...a miraculous deliverance, and I think people felt it again this year." By allowing Bush to stay in office, Colson said, God is "giving us a chance to repent and to restore some moral sanity to American life." Richard Land, a leading Southern Baptist who participates in a weekly strategy call between the White House and evangelical leaders put it this way: "Whoever won, it would have been God…

Stephen Baldwin: Presidential Advisor?

According to this article at Salon.com, yes. You know Stephen Baldwin, the dumbest and least successful of the Baldwin brothers (though I did like him in The Usual Suspects). He's now an evangelist and you've got to see him perform (and yes, that is exactly what evangelism is, a performance). And now, presidential advisor: These days, Baldwin not only has the ear of young boys who cleave to his fundamentalist reading of the Bible, and whatever skein of celebrity still clings to his Jesus T-shirts. He has been named a cultural advisor to President Bush, a formidable follow-up to his invitation…

Jim Chen on the New Jersey Ruling

Jim Chen, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, has a powerful essay comparing prohibitions on interracial marriage to prohibitions on gay marriage. I'll post a long excerpt below the fold: Among life's challenges, none is more difficult to undertake, and none is more rewarding when achieved, than the mission of finding one person to love above all others, and persuading that person to love you in return. The law has no legitimate basis for regulating this quest on the basis of the race or sex of one's beloved. The most obvious analogy supporting legal recognition is Loving v.…

Looping in Education

Wednesday was a Day of Meetings for me, starting at 8am, which means I didn't have time to type up a bunch of blog posts and schedule them as usual. Having just clawed my way out of Meetingville, though, let me take a few minutes to throw up another Academia post, before the topic gets too stale. Steinn has been thinking about the differences between the European and US educational systems (first post, second post), and he brought up an idea that I hadn't encountered before: "Looping". The idea, as described by Steinn:: When I were a lad, in elementary school you had teacher - call it a "…

Wesley Clark vs. Rote Protesters

As previously mentioned, Wesley Clark spoke on campus last night. The speech was pretty much what you'd expect from a once and future (?) Presidential aspirant with his background: he mostly talked about military matters, stressing that George Bush bad, Americ good, puppies and apple pie, yay! OK, not so much the puppies and apple pie, but, you get the idea. A student had warned me earlier in the day that some students were planning to protest Clark's appearance, but I apparently got there too late to catch them (I came in only a couple of minutes before the talk started). I did read one of…

Vacuum Technology is Black Magic

We've continued plugging away at the optical excitation experiment discussed in the Week in the Lab series last year, and have finally managed to get a decent metastable signal out of the thing. The signals are at pressures that are considerably higher than I would like (and quite a bit higher than the turbopump is happy with), but recent results from a colleague at Argonne National Lab suggest that this may well be due to the fact that one of our lasers is operating at much lower power than would be ideal. Still, it's data, and data are always good. As always with experimental work, getting…

Undergraduate Research: Why It Works

I wrote yesterday's post about the undergraduate research study very quickly, basically just to note the existence of the survey. It's sparked some good discussion, though, and I'd like to take another post or two to expand on what I think it means. Of course, the beneficial effect of undergraduate research seems almost obvious if you stop to think about it a bit. Undergraduate research works to attract students from all different backgrounds into science for a very simple reason: doing research is nothing at all like the typical science class. OK, I can really only speak for physics, here,…

Senior Days

It was a regular hoopsapalooza yesterday in Chateau Steelypips, with Syracuse playing Villanova at 2:00, and Maryland playing NC State at 3:30, both games on tv. And, of course, there were a host of other games on, including UCLA getting waxed at Washington, THE Ohio State University narrowly avoiding a loss at Michigan (and putting Tommy Amaker's ability to miss the NCAA's to the test...), and Stanford almost overcoming a 20-point deficit against Arizona, to name just the major-conference games I watched bits of. Most of the major-conference games were the final home games for one team or…

Firing Idiots

Kevin Drum and Mark Kleiman are both talking about firing teacehrs. Being moderate, wonkish guys rather than fire-breathing ideologues, they mostly say sensible things-- Kevin notes that it's really difficult to document bad teaching, and Mark has a particularly good point about teacher pay: [T]he brute fact is that we're not currently paying teachers enough to attract an adequate number of high-quality teachers. The only way to fix that is by raising wages for the kind of people we want to attract. Without that, making firing easier is mostly a matter of rearranging the deck chairs on a…

The College Football Bowl Picture

Over at Inside Higher Ed, they have a piece looking at the state of college football as we enter bowl season. This is dominated by two large tables of numbers, one good, and one bad. The first table is the good one, as it explains why the college football "championship" is so messed up. It lists the 32 bowl games that will be played over the next month, and the per-team payout for each. The five major BCS bowls pay each team $17 million, which neatly explains why the college football elite are unwilling to put in a playoff-- in any real championship system, they might end up having to share…

The Magazine Experiment: Fantasy and Science Fiction October 2007

A couple of months ago, I embarked on an experiment to read some SF magazines, and see if I was really missing out on the wonderful stuff that people are always haranguing con-goers about. I bought paper copies of Analog's November issue and the October/ November Asimov's, and commented on them here. I was unable to find paper copies of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, apparently due to their obnoxious return policy, but Kate got me an electronic version of the October issue, which I read slowly on my Palm over the next month or so. I finished it a while back, but never got around…

It's still not the sun, stupid

Real science is about the gathering of multiple lines of evidence, bulding on previous research that built on research before that. One of the hallmarks of denialism is choosing a single study or dataset out of a multitude simply because it is an outlier that confirms their prefered viewpoint. On the "It's the sun, stupid" thread, mandas has provided a very nice listing of some of the many different examinations of solar forcing on recent climate change. As with all robust scientific findings, the methods and datasets are different but the general conclusions are all the same: solar forcing…

It's the arrogance, stupid

Sad to say, I'm discovering that some people got the wrong message from my talk last night. Something went awry, I'm not sure what, because they took home exactly the opposite idea from what I intended. I'll try summarize what I meant to say here. I was supposed to talk about creationist misconceptions about evolution, so I started with a couple of real questions I've received in my email. One was the extremely common "if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys" question. What I said about it was that if you've got any knowledge of biology at all, it seems trivial and rather stupid,…

How To Make Gravy

... a culinary repost. You've got your turkey all planned out, and you've got some stock. Now, it's time to explore the true meaning of Thanksgiving. Gravy. (And maybe something to put it on.) I will tell you how to make excellent gravy with no stress and guaranteed success. Without lumps. I don't do recipes. I do theory. But this theoretical approach will get you through. Its very simple. You are going to need the following: A stick of butter or two, and an equal volume of regular flour. You can use special fancy dancy flour if you want, but that is not necessary. Several cups of a…

Sunday Chess Problem

Clearly there is only one way to celebrate the end of the semester. With the return of Sunday Chess Problem! For our return to the world of chess composition, I have chosen a charming, but not too complex, direct mate problem. It was composed by O. Strerath in 1948. White is to play and mate in two: Remember that white is always moving up the board, while black is always moving down. Horizontal ranks are numbered 1--8 from bottom to top, while vertical files are labeled a--h from left to right. So, in the diagram white's king is on g3, while black's king is on c5. We'll cut right…