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Azar Nafisi

I've only just been introduced to her, from a mention of her in a Christopher Hitchens article, but this could really be fascinating. Azar Nafisi is an Iranian expatriate who teaches literature at Johns Hopkins University. She was teaching in Iran at the time of the revolution in 1979, and had high hopes for the revolution as she hated the Shah. Alas, the Ayatollahs were not to take too kindly to educated women working outside the home. She was fired for refusing to wear a veil. She ended up teaching clandestine classes in her home to young Iranian women, introducing them to literature and…

How we'll finally wind up testing quantum gravity (Synopsis)

"There was a long history of speculation that in quantum gravity, unlike Einstein's classical theory, it might be possible for the topology of spacetime to change." -Edward Witten Quantum gravity is one of the holy grails of physics, and showing that gravitation is an inherently quantum force would be a tremendous step towards validating our present approaches to theoretical physics. Image credit: Sabine Hossenfelder, derived from the NASA/WMAP data of the CMB. While directly detecting gravitons might still be very far off, there are a number of weak-field tests involving the CMB and…

What your birthstone means, according to science

"Nobility, without virtue, is a fine setting without a gem." -Jane Porter Since ancient times, gems were believed to bestow various traits and good fortunes upon those two whom they were gifted. In more recent times, we've associated gems with the time of the year someone was born, assigning each individual month a birthstone associated with it. Image credit: Rob Lavinsky, iRocks.com – CC-BY-SA-3.0. Yet scientifically, the individual gemstones themselves hold an impressive tale, with a variety of structures, stories and histories behind them all. What we think of as the magnificence or…

Not so fast: why there likely isn't a large planet out beyond Pluto (Synopsis)

“Finding out that something you have just discovered is considered all but impossible is one of the joys of science.” -Mike Brown Earlier today, the team of Pluto-killer Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin announced that they had found evidence of a ninth planet in our Solar System beyond the orbit of Pluto, larger and more massive than even Earth. However, a closer inspection of the work shows that they predict a few things that haven't been observed, including a population of Kuiper belt objects with large inclinations and retrograde orbits, long-period Kuiper belt objects with opposite…

Are Cosmologists Fooling Themselves About The Big Bang, Dark Matter And More? (Synopsis)

"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do." -Benjamin Franklin The history of science is rife with stories of cases where a person or team, usually with a lot of clout, reached a conclusion that seemed incontrovertible. When that occurs, we often find that subsequent measurements agree with that conclusion, even if that conclusion later turns out to be wrong. Recommended speed of light values over time. Adapted from Henrion & Fischhoff (1986). This was the case for measurements of the speed of light and for the various masses of fundamental and composite…

Ask Ethan: When A Photon Gets Redshifted, Where Does The Energy Go? (Synopsis)

"...in every kind of chemical change no loss of matter occurs [...] in all the varied modes of physical change, no loss of energy takes place." -Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe When it comes to the physical laws of the Universe, perhaps the most unbreakable of all seems to be the law of conservation of energy. In every mechanical, chemical, or even nuclear reaction, the total amount of energy, when all sources are considered, appear to be conserved. Image credit: NASA / SDO. Yet in General Relativity, no strict definition of energy exists. So when the Universe expands, the photons within it get…

What's the third most common element in the Universe? (Synopsis)

"The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." -Harlan Ellison Shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe was filled with 99.99999993% hydrogen and helium, with the rest being lithium. But stars change everything, by fusing those elements -- the lightest ones -- into heavier ones, climbing the periodic table and enriching the Universe with its contents. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech. After billions of years of star formation and nuclear fusion, a new 3rd most common element has emerged, and it isn’t carbon — formed from helium fusion — which only clocks in at…

Strange but true: dark matter grows hair around stars and planets (Synopsis)

"Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them." -Samuel Johnson Dark matter may make up 27% of the Universe's energy density, compared to just 5% of normal (atomic) matter, but in our Solar System, it's notoriously sparse. In particular, there's just a nanogram's worth per cubic kilometer, which makes the fact that we've never directly detected it seem inevitable. Image credit: J. Cooley, Phys.Dark Univ. 4 (2014) 92-97, via http://inspirehep.net/record/1322880. But recent work has demonstrated that…

Suing Judges

While conservatives are busy saying, "Attacks on judicial independence? What attacks on judicial independence?", South Dakota has an amendment on the ballot this year allowing people to sue judges for making decisions they don't like. And that's not the half of it. The LA Times reports: South Dakota's Amendment E would have the most sweeping effect; it has drawn opposition from conservatives and liberals -- including, in a rare show of unanimity, every member of the state Legislature. Under the amendment judges in the state could lose their jobs or assets if citizens disliked how they…

Another Fisking of Stark

Steve Reuland, my fellow Panda's Thumb contributor who is finishing his PhD in genetics, has also written a fisking of Rodney Stark's pathetic attempt to jump into a field he has no knowledge of. I particularly liked his response to Stark's silly claim that mammals and reptiles are examples of genera: Needless to say, anyone who thinks that mammals are a genus and that elephants comprise a single species needs to be hit over the head with a grade-school text book and forever disbarred from opening his mouth when it comes to biology. His bombast about species boundaries being firm and distinct…

Flying Things

Steinn reports that the NRC has made its recommendations for NASA's Beyond Einstein program. The winners appear to be LISA, a gravity wave observatory, and JDEM, a competition of dark energy focussed satellites. Steinn has lots of links to the various projects. The executive summary of the report is availabe here (pdf). I know next to nothing about these things, but from afar it always seemed like LISA was one of those neat ideas that was never actually going to happen. The basic idea is to put three satellites in orbit around the sun and bounce lasers around to measure gravitational waves.…

New Toys

Well, I'm back in Texas and just in time for Steve Jobs to introduce new toys I can't afford. At the risk of turning Chad's blog into an Apple advertisement, every time I pass an Apple store, it takes significant willpower to not walk out of there with a new iPhone. I find it endlessly amusing to load up my papers on the demo models -- yes, I am easily amused. A certain theorist was showing his off at Aspen, too. Well, you don't want a phone with your iPod? You can now get an iPod touch, WiFi included. 8 and 16 gigs. iPod Nano? Smaller with really tiny video. Old school iPods? 160 gigs now.…

USVI: Love the Hat

One final vacation picture: what with all the snorkeling and boat-chartering and hiking, I was starting to worry that I might seem too cool to be a physicist. There was a chance that I might meet somebody, and not have them realize immediately what I do for a living. At the same time, my Northern European heritage doesn't exactly put me in a great position for dealing with intense tropical sun. After a day or two, I noticed that my scalp was strting to sunburn, through my hair. So I needed a hat of some sort. I decided to kill two birds with one stone, and looked long and hard to find a hat…

Alpher Obituaries

I don't know if it's official enough for Wikipedia, but the college has posted a nice obituary for Ralph Alpher: Alpher taught at Union from 1986 to 2004 and was director of the Dudley Observatory. He also spent more than 30 years at the General Electric Research and Development Center in Niskayuna. In 1948, as a young doctoral student, he wrote the first mathematical model for the creation of the universe and predicted the discovery of cosmic background radiation that proves the Big Bang theory. Hundreds of people showed up at George Washington University for his dissertation defense, but…

You've Come a Long Way, Doctor

The Day the Earth Stood Still was on tv yesterday, and we watched most of it because it's a classic, and because the alternative was bad college football. Kate had never seen it before, and was surprised to find that it wasn't campy. There is, however, one scene that has become unintentionally hilarious over the past fifty-odd years. Two Army doctors are outside the room where Klaatu (Michael Rennie) is being held, and they have a conversation that goes something like this (paraphrased, from memory): Doctor 1: How old would you say [Klaatu] is? Doctor 2: Thirty-five, or thirty-eight. Doctor 1…

SAT Challenge Update

The Blogger SAT Challenge made the front page of Slashdot last week, making a huge spike in the traffic here, and bringin this blog to the attention to this blog-- I've had a half-dozen emails and comments from students and colleagues who hadn't seen the blog before. Of course, after a blitz of posts associated with the unveiling of the Challenge, I pretty much reverted to being the King of the Physical Science Channel, and didn't post anything more about it. Dave Munger has kept talking about it, though, and has posted a lot of interesting material, including comments on his own essay, an…

Marine invertebrate temptations

People, don't do this to me. I've got all this work I've got to get done so that I'm free to go on a date this evening, and you keep sending me these distractions. Like, for instance, this link to a collection of Marine Invertebrate Video and Film Stock Footage. Cephalopods and nudibranchs and crustaceans and salps, all categorized (there's even an invertebrate mating category! With 421 clips! It's free porn!) and with thousands of high resolution videos. The previews are all free, but you can also license HD video of these beautiful action shots. I will be disciplined, though. I'm closing…

People Are Scum

From an all-campus email this morning: A non-specific bomb threat was discovered overnight in [Building]. A note was discovered at 4:16 a.m. Following our emergency response plan, the Schenectady Police were immediately notified. A sweep of the building was conducted by the Schenectady Police, State Police and the Sheriff's Department and it was determined there was no immediate threat and the building was deemed safe to reopen for classes at 8 a.m. However, in light of the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech, we have decided to cancel or move all classes scheduled to meet this morning in […

The etiquette of squid-eating

Tantalizing news: somewhere out there in the wide, wide world is a video of a pilot whale eating a large squid. "We looked hard and saw a tentacle of a squid hanging from its mouth and there were other pieces of squid stuck to the whale's body. It made a number of brusque movements on its side in the water to free the tentacle to eat it — and there we were filming and photographing it all." If you follow TONMO you already know it's probably not a giant squid, as the article breathlessly reports, but it's still going to be interesting because whales that feed on squid do have a problem: the…

Lighten Up, Already

One of the unfortunate elements about the NCAA basketball tournament is that in addition to some great basketball, it brings around a few reminders of what an unpleasant organization the NCAA can be: During the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament last weekend, John Goodman -- a freshman who wears a steer costume to cheer for the Texas Longhorns -- did what comes naturally to mascots: He patted a referee on the back. This usually brings applause, laughter or good-natured booing from fans. But in the postseason tournament, when rules are stricter, N.C.A.A. supervisors "actually kind of…

Quantum Gravity: Physics?

The post title is taken from the announcement for today's colloquium talk. The abstract: Quantum gravity is the theory which is thought to underlie quantum theory and general relativity. I will introduce the subject, emphasizing recent results which suggest that spatial geometry is discrete. Such discrete geometry may have an observational signature, especially if it breaks Lorentz invariance. I will describe limits on such discrete geometry effects by astrophysical observations and will also argue that, in the not too distant future, quantum gravity may become physics and enjoy contact with…

Physics News of the Day

A couple of quick stories off Physics Web: First, they have a short article about a record-breaking cat state. This is a state in which a group of researchers have maneged to "entangle" six photons so that they are either all polarized vertically, or all polarized horizontally. This breaks the previous record of five entangled photons, and is interesting mostly because it's getting to the system size where you can start thinking about using these entangled photons to transmit quantum information and do quantum error correction. There's also a lovely "artist's conception" picture, reproduced…

links for 2008-11-19

Is getting takeout that much worse for the planet than cooking at home? - By Jacob Leibenluft - Slate Magazine Probably not. (tags: environment science society social-science slate) Michael Nielsen » Malcolm Gladwell's new book, "Outliers", and the 10,000 hour rule "One of the main claims of Outliers is that putting in 10,000 hours of practice is a prerequisite for great achievement. I believe this is the wrong way of thinking about the relationship between achievement and the 10,000 hour rule. A clue to a better way comes from some examples which to some extent disprove the claim." (…

links for 2008-08-30

Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Stories / Shade by Steven Gould Teleporteurs sans frontieres. (tags: SF stories) Search Magazine - On God P.J. O'Rourke does his best Gregg Easterbrook impression. (tags: science religion stupid) Built on Facts : Falling from Heaven " If my opinion is worth anything though, I think classic literature is improved by a little physics." (tags: physics math science blogs culture literature humanities) Michael Nielsen û Quantum computing for everyone "[I]magine for the sake of argument that I could give you a simple, concrete explanation of how…

links for 2008-08-21

Survival Blog for Scientists û Blog Archive û Giving your new results away too soon "[W]here do you announce your results first: in the title? In the abstract? In the introduction? Or, in the results paragraph?" All three of those, plus the Conclusion. (tags: academia writing science journals) Tolerant Faculty, Intolerant Students :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs "Thirty-one percent of students said it was somewhat or very important to them that instructors not challenge their personal beliefs." (tags: academia education politics society US)…

links for 2008-07-18

Kieran Healy's Weblog - Elementary Particles "Particle physics has been in the doldrums a bit lately, so they could do with some interdisciplinary reinvigoration. Also, their research budgets remain quite large." (tags: social-science silly physics blogs) Crooked Timber » » Necrotrends: The GOP Was The Party of Civil Rights "So long as political considerations are divorced from concerns about biological vivification, the possibilities are endless." (tags: politics silly stupid US) Electron microscope sees single hydrogen atoms - physicsworld.com "The team has also been able to watch…

Burying the Lede, Hoops Edition

I didn't see the game last night, as I got distracted by some other tasks, but North Carolina narrowly beat Virginia last night, on a late jump hook by Tyler Hansbrough. This might seem surprising, given that UVA was .500 on the season, and 1-8 in the league, and indeed, the AP describes it that way. Of course, nowhere in that article do you find the crucial bit of information. You have to go to ESPN's box score for that information (their game recap just repeats the AP text). From the box score, you can infer that Ty Lawson did not play, which makes the struggle a whole lot less surprising.…

I Like Toast

"Hey, whatcha doin'?" "Making breakfast." "I don't know if you know this, but I like toast." "Really? You don't say." "Was that sarcasm? I'm not so good with sarcasm." "No, I just never would've guessed from the way you gaze longingly at the counter every morning..." "OK, that's definitely sarcasm." "Or the way you lick the floor to pick up spilled crumbs..." "OK--" "Or the way you shove your head into my lap when I'm eating breakfast. Or, for that matter, the way that we have the 'I Like Toast' conversation every morning. What could possibly give you the idea that I don't know about your…

links for 2008-01-22

Coyotebanjo: Day 03 "In the Trenches" (shout-out Friday edition) The "Friday Shout-Out," an interesting classroom technique. (via Pedablogue) (tags: academia education society psychology) onipress.com 23-page free preview comic for the upcoming Jumper movie. (tags: books movies SF) Graphene breaks speed record - physicsworld.com "Its high intrinsic mobility... means that graphene is the only material where electrons at room temperature can move thousands of interatomic distances without scattering." (tags: materials physics science news) Exploding Unicorn: License to Grill "Under the…

Idle Question: Does "Fisking" Ever Work?

The context for this would take too long to explain, so I'll just throw it out there: Can anyone think of an example of an Internet troll changing their opinions or behavior because of the savage wit of people responding to their comments? I ask this because I spent a good seven years on rec.arts.sf.* before moving to blogdom, and I can't think of one, either on Usenet or in a weblog's comments. I can think of a few people who made flame-tastic debuts on one group or another and later turned into reasonable regulars (Tshen comes to mind, for the RASWR-J crowd), but they always had a spark of…

Multimedia Trash Talk

In one of those "Living in the Future" sorts of moments, our regular lunchtime pick-up basketball game has an email listserver. Pretty much every day there's a game, there's some email chatter and trash talk. My signature comment is to describe one of the other players as being "Weak like a really weak thing." One of my colleagues from the bio department decided to up the ante, and videotape some trash talk: Of course, this couldn't go unanswered: (It helps if you know that Steve's a biologist doing research on the canopy structure of moss...) There's been a recent elevation in the level of…

Guess-the-Lyrics: Unusual Rhymes II

Same deal as the last game: Each of the following pairs of words is taken from a pop song, where they are set up to rhyme (many of the phrases don't really rhyme, but they're treated as if they do). Your job is to guess the song based on the rhyming pair. 1) Lion sleeps/ soul to keep 2) bartender/ medical center 3) health department/ glove compartment 4) backup plan/ foreign land 5) in the crotch/ Scottish loch 6) insanity/ and misery 7) fidgety-fidge/ Waterloo Bridge 8) a coma/ aroma 9) burden/ curtains 10) gets mentioned/ detention 11) write exams/ give a damn 12) Edison/ medicine 13)…

Unusual Question: Boxers v. Briefs?

A second uncomfortable question from tbell: boxers, briefs, or other? That's an interesting question. Not many people would think to ask about a comparison between professional fighting and the products of the legal profession. Boxing, while no longer the cultural force that it once was, does occasionally provide for some compelling watching. Boxers themselves tend to be a little cartoonish, a combination of being hit in the head repeatedly and the sport's need for endless hype. Legal writing, on the other hand, tends to be rather dry and repetitive. The main points in a legal brief are laid…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Signing Tomorrow

Today is my birthday-- my age in dog years is now equal to the freezing point of water in Kelvin (to three significant figures). I'm celebrating by not reading anything that might piss me off, and by spending the day at home watching soccer (about which more later) and getting some stuff done around the house. I'm working on a nice surprise for SteelyKid, which should be finished this weekend, if the weather cooperates. I do want to remind those of you within striking distance of Schenectady, though, that I will be signing How to Teach Physics to Your Dog tomorrow, Saturday the 19th, from 1-2…

Links for 2010-05-01

slacktivist: Empathy and epistemic closure "The stupidity of the tea partiers has nothing to do with innate intelligence or with acquired intelligence. It has nothing to do with smartness or brainpower or where anyone falls on the bell curve of Stanford-Binet test scores. It is, rather, a moral stupidity, a moral imbecilism that produces simple imbecilism -- the inevitable intellectual consequence of a selfish refusal to listen to what empathy is shouting from all sides. The correlation between bigotry and stupidity has been widely observed, leading to much speculation that there is likely…

Energy Grid: The Blame Game

By the by, I have another post up on The Energy Grid called The Blame Game. This week's question is one of finding fault. What brought us to the current confluence of crises? Was it a failure of the political, or the technological? Unlike the beltway pundits and the political scoundrels they defend, who use the phrase "blame game" to mockingly to retreat from accepting responsibility for, well anything, I don't think blame is just a game. Insanity is sometimes defined as trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well, if you never bother to revisit your…

It's a rite of passage on Scienceblogs…

…that you have to take a sharp poke at the godless or godly to try and trigger a response, and now it's Chris's turn. He's arguing with the usual faith/empiricism continuum, and adds a third axis to the debate, as illustrated here. OK, it's an interesting try. I don't think it quite works, though. That "cranks" zone on the left needs to be expanded up towards the faith vertex, and actually ought to be indistinguishable from "theists". The other deep flaw is the position of "agnostics" (I have a suspicion that Chris would place himself in that group). I can think of several agnostics around…

Big Earthquake in Mexico, and a smaller one

Updated" The USGS gives details of two earthquakes in the Baja region, Mexico. At UTC 18:33 a 5.0 quake seems to have occurred at 28.931°N, 113.022°W, which is in the Gulf of California (a.k.a. Sea of Cortez) near and south of the island Angel de la Guarda. The second and larger quake, a 6.0 (preliminary) magnitude quake occurred at 29.568°N, 113.578°W is near the same island, but on the other side (north) of it. It is fun to watch the news agencies get all confused. The only on the scene report we have is from about four hundred miles north-northeast, in San Diego, where the city…

Minnesotan Citizen Jury will Evaluate Recount Process

The Citizens Jury on Election Recounts is a privately funded entity that has assembled 24 jurors and given them stipends and various resources to evaluate the recount process and make recommendations. The "jurors" are randomly selected regular people. "I think there needs to be many different examinations of the lessons learned from the recount," said Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, who, along with Rep. Laura Brod, R-New Prague, has endorsed the citizen jury concept for this hyperlocal and hypertopical issue. "Citizens are the ones participating in the elections, and they have…

Michele Bachmann wins award!

On Countdown! The "Best Petard To Be Hoist Upon Later Award!" Michele Bachmann, who represents the district that is, much to my chagrin, just a few blocks from where I live, has been calling for people to give the upcoming decadal census a pass, is a person of amazing moral integrity. You see she considers the census to be an evil plot by Acorn to facilitate the rounding up and internment of Christians (or something). However, as I'm sure she knows as a member of Congress the census is also the instrument our benevolent government (benevolent now that the Dems are in power) uses to figure…

How Twitter can make history

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics. Clay Shirky: Clay Shirky's consulting focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, wireless networks, social software and open-source development. New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and…

The light bulb as heater theory of saving energy.

A custom here in Minnesota is to dangle a light bulb near the water meter or any other water-carrying pipes that are in your unheated basement. You don't need a switch. You just have a light socket on a wire, and at the beginning of winter you screw in a 100 watt light bulb, and at the end of winter, you loosen the light bulb so it stays off for the summer. This prevents the pipes from freezing and provides light in the basement at the same time. This sort of practice has led me to wonder if compact fluorescents should be pulled out of some of the light sockets during the winter, and…

Emailing Habits And Diurnal Patterning

Duncan Watts at Yahoo Research in New York City and a few pals studied the time of day at which around 3000 individuals at a European university sent emails over an 83-day period as well as the email habits of over 122,000 e-mailers at a US university over a 2-year period. They found two distinct types of emailer. They termed the first "day labourers" because they tended to send emails throughout the normal working day between 0900 and 1800 but not at other times. The second group they called "emailaholics" because these people sent emails throughout the waking hours from 0900 to 0100.…

Friendship, grief, anarchy, fine dining, and random gunfire

I was trying to explain to a friend who does not read my blog what I'd written about a set of related topics, and realized that what I've done may be a bit confusing. So, I've assembled the titles and links to these posts into a simple chronological list. If you've only read one or two of these, you might want to read them all. Or, just go back to sweeping out your garage, or whatever you were doing this fine day. This is also relevant in relation to the Pro-Test thing that has been going on. From Graduate School to Prison: What is the rational argument for ELF or ALF? Dinner at Azia…

White House Torture Architects' Exemption is the Wrong Thing To Do

This is being reported: President Barack Obama does not intend to prosecute Bush administration officials who devised the policies that led to the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday. [Earlier,] ... he said "it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice, that they will not be subject to prosecution." He did not specifically address the policymakers. Asked Sunday on ABC's "This Week" about the fate of those officials, Emanuel said the president…

What you 'get' is what you see.

The caption of this photograph at The Guardian says only, "Nowruz celebrations in Afghanistan." Nowruz is the name of the Iranian New Year, which is celebrated in a number of countries by people of several faiths. The baskets of dried fruits eaten during the holiday provide the only visual connection to the colorful festivities, and you have to know more than the paper tells you to see that. For many viewers, this will a thoroughly conventional image of the Middle East. How do you view a photograph when the ethnicity represented is the context? How do you view a photograph when the…

Don't Take O2 for Granted

There has always been Oxygen on the earth, but it was not floating around free in the atmosphere as it is today (most of it still isn't). Indeed, it is kind of strange that the earth is blanketed in a mixture of toxic, corrosive liquid (water) and equally corrosive gas (the oxygen in the atmosphere). Imagine showing up at a planet without an atmosphere or liquid water, and splashing the water and spraying the air from he earth all over that planet. Depending on the planet, it could be like throwing vinegar into a bowl of baking soda. Third grade science fair time! In fact, this could…

Facebook + lazy lawyers = Oh Crap.

OK, so there you are having a drink. A drink with an unbrella. Minding your own business. And checking out your Facebook page. And suddenly.... A High Court judge today approved the serving of court papers via Facebook, the popular social network website, in what is thought to be a New Zealand first. The High Court in Wellington was told that Axe Market Garden is trying to sue Craig Axe who is alleged to have taken $241,000 from the firm account. Counsel for the company Daniel Vincent said the plaintiff was effectively Axe's father John and there were difficulties in serving papers on…

National Pi Day is Official

It used to be a festival of fun created and celebrated by geeks but with no official recognition. Now, National Pi Day is a legal holiday in the US (but not one you get to take a day off of work for). Washington politicians took time from bailouts and earmark-laden spending packages on Wednesday for what might seem like an unusual act: officially designating a National Pi Day. That's Pi as in ratio-of-a-circle's-circumference-to-diameter, better known as the mathematical constant beginning with 3.14159. The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a resolution introduced two days…

Music and Me: The Early Years

I am the least musical person I've ever met who is still alive. Of course, most nonmusical people don't go around talking about it, so I probably actually know more tone deaf, talentless people than that. It is strange, though. I should be musical. My mother sang semiprofessionally, doing radio in the pre-WWII days before they had things on tape (commercials and stuff). My oldest sister is known as Lightning Fingers Liz, owing to her prowess with the mandolin. My brother had a rock band from something like 1968 through 1990-something and is quite talented with the lead guitar. My other…