Search Content

Displaying results 62951 - 63000 of 87947

They Grow Up So Fast

There are certain milestone moments in the history of any household that, while representing small triumphs, are also tinged with a bit of sadness. Baby's first steps. The first visit from the Tooth Fairy. High school graduation. Each represents a passage from a comfortable and familiar phase of life into something new and unknown. An opportunity to spread your wings and explore new horizons, but also a sign that something good has been lost. Such are the vicissitudes of a life well-lived. My friends, my little slice of heaven has experienced such a moment. Isaac the cat has started…

Media Reaction to Romney II: The Bad Guys

Meanwhile, here's Chris Matthews in full tantrum after the Republican candidates were asked if they accepted Biblical literalism in the big You Tube debate: MATTHEWS: Governor, I think you, like a lot of conservatives, believe in the original purpose of the Constitution as written. It's our sort of secular bible. It says there should be no religious test ever required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. Why are you Republican candidates submitting to religious vetting about your belief in the literal nature of the Bible? Why put up with those kind…

Eureka Publicity: Blurbs and Talks

Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist has officially been sent to the printers, so we're at the phase of things where I don't have anything to do but think about publicity. There are some reviews forthcoming, at least one of which I'm very happy about, but I'll share more about that when it becomes public. I've also picked up some nice blurbs from very smart folks: "I know, I know, you think you're just not smart enough to be a scientist. Chad Orzel might convince you otherwise with Eureka. Drawing on basketball, stamp collecting, Angry Birds, Iron Chef, and Antiques Roadshow among his…

Evolution and Ideology

Over at Huffington Post, Denis Alexander hawks his new book Biology and Ideology: From Descartes to Darwin, coedited by Ronald Numbers. It features an essay by Alister McGrath entitled, “Evolutionary Biology in Recent Atheist Apologetics.” McGrath, if you are unfamiliar with him, is a Christian apologist whose most recent book is a defense of the notion of heresy. It features a foreword from Rick Warren, who writes, "We know that truth is eternal and unchanging. If it's true, it's not new.” Charming. Somehow McGrath is not someone I trust to lecture me about the perils of ideology.…

Coyne on Natural Selection

Jerry Coyne offers some further thoughts on the Richard Lewontin essay I discussed in yesterday's post. Specifically, he addresses the question of why natural selection deserver pride of place among evolutionary mechanisms. He writes: First of all, yes, it's true that the evidence for natural selection as the cause of most evolutionary change in the past is not as strong as the evidence that evolutionary change occurred. It cannot be otherwise. We can see evolution happening in the fossil record, but it is infinitely harder to parse out the causes of that change. We weren't around when…

Harris, Pinker Join the Party

Sorry for the lack of blogging. Such are the vicissitudes of academic life. Piles of free time one week, crazy busy the next. The fallout over Jerry Coyne's recent article in TNR continues. Sam Harris and Steven Pinker have now contributed responses. Both are excellent. Click here and scroll to the bottom. Harris goes for the sarcastic approach: It is a pity that people like Jerry Coyne and Daniel Dennett can't see how easily religion and science can be reconciled. Having once viewed the world as they do, I understand how their fundamentalist rationality has blinded them to deeper…

Links for 2009-09-09

slacktivist: Same to you, buddy "A $100 account with no fees costs the bank more in paperwork and tellers' time than it's worth. In the long-run, such accounts can help depositors develop savings habits and savings balances, developing into the sort of customers banks can and do make money from. But neither the executives nor the shareholders of the bank are interested in that kind of long-run -- particularly not when, in the short run, they're losing money on these tiny accounts. So seeing no incentive to provide such low-balance, no-fee accounts that would allow our young couple to cash…

Links for 2009-08-25

Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Making Lists: Mindblowing SF by Women and People of Color "[S]ince someone always finds a way to claim that they just don't know where to find such or who the women and/or people of color writing in the genre are, I hope that this list will go a long way toward alleviating that problem." (tags: sf race gender blogs tor books literature) Eeyore and the Unintended Consequence « Easily Distracted "I'm all for accepting that the gap between intent and practice will inevitably be quite wide, and that in that gap, all sorts of devils can…

PNAS: Ethan Allen, Education Program Manager

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Ethan Allen, a program manager.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I manage education and outreach (terrible term, hate it) for two different Centers here at UW the Center for Nanotechnology and the Genetically…

Precision Measurement Smackdown Explained

Yesterday's historical physics poll was about precision measurements. Who were those people, and why are they worth knowing about? As usual, we'll do these in reverse order of popularity... First up is Ole Rømer, a Danish astronomer who is no stranger to this blog, having been profiled as part of the Top Eleven series back in the early days of ScienceBlogs. Rømer's big accomplishment was the first really good measurement of the speed of light, which he did by timing the eclipses of Jupiter's moon Io. These are seen to occur slightly sooner when Earth and Jupiter are on the same side of the…

links for 2009-06-30

Physics Buzz: A day at the International Submarine Races "Last weekend, travelers at a rest stop in Minnesota became alarmed when a group of college kids pulled up in a U-haul truck, carefully unloaded a large, sleek object from the back, and set to work on it with power tools. About the length of a person, it was painted white and resembled a torpedo. Fearing the worst, someone called the police." (tags: science physics gadgets blogs physics-buzz) Views: Poverty Studies - Inside Higher Ed "Now that acute socioeconomic suffering has hit home or threatens to hit home among university…

links for 2009-05-28

Race and the Full Court Press at Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture A good piece on the creepy racial subtext of that Malcolm Gladwell article. (I can stop posting about that any time I want to. Really.) (tags: race culture sports basketball society) Confessions of a Community College Dean: Men "I mentioned a little while back that it's raining men here. The percentage of male students here has been climbing for the last several years, and the recession seems to be giving it a conspicuous boost. Male students are still a minority, though mostly in the over-21 age…

Good Science Books for Kids

The proprietor of Good Mom, Bad Mom emails to point out a post spinning off Monday's Goldilocks post. A good thing she did, as Technorati has collapsed into utter uselessness, at least for finding people who link to my posts. Her post quotes an unnamed correspondent, who writes: My two daughters are both compulsive readers, gobbling up everything in their path. As a result, they both have very large vocabularies are very well informed about a range of things. I love it--instead of watching TV and getting dumb, they're reading, and getting smart. Mostly they read novels, but it's amazing how…

Replacement Tablet PC Options?

I have a Lenovo thinkPad X61 tablet that I use for a bunch of things, but mainly for working on the book in places that aren't my home or office on campus, and lecturing. I do use the tablet features, primarily for marking up my lecture slides (I have PowerPoint slides that I use for class, and I leave blank spaces on them for examples, which I hand-write. This helps slow down the pace of the lecture a little, which is the chief student complaint about PowerPoint lectures. The X61 is a few years old, now-- three and a bit years-- so it's been getting kind of creaky. It crashes hard every…

Warped Passages by Lisa Randall

I have nothing useful or interesting to say about electoral politics, but I suspect that's all people will want to read about today. So here's a book post that's been backlogged for quite a while. Lisa Randall's Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions dates from 2005, and was, I think, part of the huge spate of string-theory-related books at that time (just before the String Theory Backlash books of 2006). It includes the usual survey of the Standard Model and the problems thereof, with an emphasis on the sort of extra-dimension theories that Randall and…

Syracuse- West Virginia

It's been a while since I did a basketball game recap here, mostly because it's been a while since I saw a whole game. Thanks to the DVR, I saw the whole Syracuse-West Virginia game today, in which Syracuse narrowly escaped Morgantown with a win. They had a ten point lead with two and a half minutes, but after Andy Rautins fouled out, West Virginia made a bunch of threes, and Syracuse made a bunch of minor errors, and the final score was a one-point win for the Orange. The minute Rautins went out, I had a horrible flashback to Maryland blowing a ten-point lead to Duke in the final minute…

I get email

You guys are so unlucky. You don't get to regularly read the glory that is the awesome creationist Neal. I shall be generous and share a few of his latest rants with you. Note: the language in these comments is about what you'd expect from a potty-mouthed 8-year-old. You have been warned. Lets, for one moment, forget the social conventionally traditional, "this is what the fuck we want to be the reality of the situation" type stupid logic that myers, etc etc etc want to be able to continue to slam down the throats of everybody around them. And to make themselves "FEOW SO GOOOOOOOD" about…

Links for 2009-10-01

slacktivist: In the belly of the fish "My fundie Bible teachers considered this the main, or even the only, point of this story worth considering. Their task, as they saw it, was to defend the story as being "literally" true, and so they'd share legends (see Bartley, James) of sailors swallowed by whales and go to great lengths to argue that such a thing was possible. This led to some rather strange and uninspiring sermons, the main point of which seemed to be that God is capable of creating a fish that could swallow a man whole and keep that man alive for several days. The message of those…

links for 2009-01-02

So it goes.: A Day in the Life "I wake up to the sun's early morning glow or from the Luganda streaming through my mosquito net, which I'm not sure. It is another day in Uganda, a handful of kilometers beneath the equator. I can easily recall the first days in Africa when the sun did not wrestle me out of bed at dawn and when the Luganda was strange and invoked loneliness. But now, 5 months in, I slip out of bed and into the day easily. " (tags: education academia society culture charity world) Biocurious: Edge World Question 2009: What will change everything? "The 2009 Edge World…

Recent Movie Round-Up

For the first time since I don't know when, Kate and I have gone to see movies in a theater on two consecutive weekends. I'm pretty sure this hasn't happened in at least two years. Anyway, before my general (spoiler-free) movie comments, some trailers: You Don't Mess With the Zohan. Seriously, this is a movie? I thought it was just a fake commercial slapped together for SNL that had somehow come unmoored from the show and started turning up on other channels. The Love Guru. Mike Myers has outdone himself: I hate this character already. Australia. For everyone who has been dying to see a movie…

SETI in My Inbox

One of the nice things about being a semi-pro blogger is that people send me tips about things that might be blogworthy. Most of these go into the daily links dump posts, but every now and then one hits at a time when I'm short of material, and looking for something to write about. Such as the email that came in last night from KQED in San Francisco, plugging a video about the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, and the new Allen Telescope Array that's expected to speed the search up by a few orders of magnitude. There's a lot to like, here. It's a well-made video, with…

Plot Synopsis Project, and the Problem with LiveJournal

Joshua Palmatier, whose first two books I enjoyed, and probably ought to booklog, has organized the "Plot Synopsis Project," in which a bunch of published SF authors post copies of the plot synopses they sent with their successful novel pitches, and talk about the writing process. Most of them have lists of the participants posted, but here's a link to Tobias Buckell's post because he has just the list, independent of his plot summary, so you don't need to worry about accidentally reading spoilers. This is a terrific idea, as the plot synopsis thing is one of the more mysterious and…

Kin Selection Rescued by Phylogenetics?

30 years ago, biologists thought they'd solved one of Darwin's thorniest problems, the evolution of sterile social insects: No doubt many instincts of very difficult explanation could be opposed to the theory of natural selection,âcases, in which we cannot see how an instinct could possibly have originated...I will not here enter on these several cases, but will confine myself to one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to my whole theory. I allude to the neuters or sterile females in insect-communities: for these neuters often differ widely in…

SciWo's Storytime: Ocean!

In support of our on-going DonorsChoose challenge, this month Minnow and I will be exploring science-related books for SciWo's storytime. I have to admit, I'm enjoying the challenge of finding sciencey books appropriate for a 2.5 year old's attention span. There seem to be a plethora of books for the 4-8 year old set, but fewer for the younger crowd. Well, that's not true. There are an awful lot of books about animals, especially farm animals, but Minnow has got her animals down pat, and we all know there is more to science than zoology. I'm also discovering that it is easier to keep Minnow…

ScienceWoman's Guide to Writing a Research Proposal in Eight Easy Steps

I'm back to working on my class on Experimental Design and Data Analysis. One of my goals for the course is to have students work in groups to write an NSF-style proposal. So I sat down this morning to think about the steps it takes to write a research proposal. When I turned to google, I found a lot of tips on the writing of proposals, but not a lot of tips about how to actually generate the content that goes into the proposals. Since my course focus is how-to-do-science, I'm more interested in the content than the style. (Yes, I'm sure style can make or break a borderline proposal, but if…

In defense of hir in a male-dominated environment

After the weekend, I'll be back with a follow up to the post on my progress towards tenure, and I'll try to address some of the substantive and thought-provoking comments that you all have raised. But, here in the States, it's already a holiday weekend, and so for today, I'll punt and take on a side issue from that comment thread. Comrade Physioprof commented: "hir" is a total ...abomination! It is so ...distracting it totally ruins the flow of reading, because it is NOT A REAL ...WORD! In terms of identifiability of an anonymous individual, how much difference does a factor of two make in…

Ask Sciencewomen revisited: Not giving up this "silly scientist stuff" just because I'm going to have a baby.

In January 2008, a reader (Serious Scientist) sent me a query about dealing with inlaws who thought she should give up on her scientific career when her baby arrived. They wanted her to go to a baby shower across the country, without her husband, and she was dreading the trip and the questions and judgements that would certainly arrive during the party. I encourage you all to look back into the archives and read her original letter, and the wonderful advice everyone offered to Serious Scientist. Serious's letter, even buried back in the archives, has generated a couple of recent comments.…

CFP: Engineering and social justice special issue, get your papers in!

Call for Manuscripts: Special issue of Engineering Studies: Journal of the International Network for Engineering Studies on "Engineering and Social Justice" Editors, Engineering Studies: Gary Downey (Virginia Tech, USA) and Juan Lucena (Colorado School of Mines, USA) Special Issue Editor: Jen Schneider (Colorado School of Mines, USA) This planned special issue of Engineering Studies invites submissions from scholars across the disciplines who study engineering and its intersections with social justice. Engineering, as educational and professional practices often aimed at developing…

Rave drug testing - public benefit?

A recent discussion with some of my neuropharmacology colleagues led me to go back through the cobwebs and revisit the Terra Sig archives for posts on drugs of abuse. The following was my third post ever and the first on actual scientific substance (the first two were introductions: a hello post and an explanation of what the heck Terra Sigillata actually is). The following post appeared at the Blogspot home of Terra Sigillata on 26 December 2005. Let me start by saying that the draconian US laws in the 'war against drugs' would ever prevent the following from happening here: Sounds like a…

20th anniversary of the disappearance of Tiffany Sessions

Twenty years ago, University of Florida junior, Tiffany Sessions, disappeared from her townhouse complex in Gainesville, Florida. What happened to her remains a mystery today. The photo to the left shows Ms Sessions on the left as she appeared in 1989 with the photo on the right age progressed to how she would've appeared last year. Please accept my apologies in advance for those put off by yet another bit of disproportionate public attention given to the fate of a pretty blonde young woman gone missing. While a graduate student, I lived for two years in the same complex as Tiffany up…

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry - Glowing Accolades

Nature's gift of green fluorescent protein (GFP) from the jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, has always been important to me, personally and professionally. In fact, PharmGirl, MD, and I would have never met if not for this wonder macromolecule nor then would PharmKid exist. Well, it appears that GFP has been of enough important to others that the three scientists central to its discovery and development were just awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Osamu Shimomura (Woods Hole and Boston University) first isolated GFP from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria, which drifts with the currents off…

NIEHS Needs Toxicological Consultant

When one serves on NIH grant review panels, or study sections, one must now register with the US government as a government contractor in order to get reimbursement for hotel and meals, plus the staggering $200 honorarium for each day of the meeting (for which you have spent between two and four weeks of reading, writing, and prep time.) As a result, you get on e-mail lists for all sorts of federal solicitations for bids on all kinds of projects, or "federal business opportunities." I chose not to opt out of these e-mails because, well, you just can't have enough e-mail, right?. In all…

A celebration of life-saving natural products

The statin class of cholesterol-lowering agents is rich with history and lessons in the power of natural products, the potential of the prepared mind, and just how precarious the path of drug development can be. American Scientist, the official publication of the scientific research society Sigma Xi, hosts this issue an absolutely lovely article entitled, "Statins: From Fungus to Pharma." Expertly and engagingly written by University of Pennsylvania biology professor Dr Philip A Rea, the article launches with the story of a then-young Japanese biochemist, Akira Endo. (Evidence of my…

Dr. Flea on medblogging and malpractice

Via Berci Meskó at Science Roll, I learned that the medblogger-formerly-known-as Flea has just given his first detailed interview since shutting down his blog during his pediatric malpractice case. Fellow physician, Orac, had a characteristically complete commentary on the situation that included the admonition not to blog about one's own ongoing malpractice trial. I also recall being shocked at the time that Flea would make off-color comments about the plaintiff attorney's bedroom habits. In his interview on Eric Turkewitz's New York Personal Injury Law Blog, Dr Robert "Flea" Lindeman…

For fuller, thicker lashes...a glaucoma treatment

I once had a pharmacology professor who told us, "Today's side effects are tomorrow's therapy." What he meant was one's garbage is another's treasure. Side effects in one setting can be used for therapeutic benefit in another. A perfect example is minoxidil, the antihypertensive vasodilator, that had the unusual side effect of causing inappropriate hair growth. But when formulated in a cream whose distribution could be restricted by where you put it, voila!...you have Rogaine (Regaine outside the US). Well, a similar situation has been emerging over the last several years with "…

Quackwatch founder Stephen Barrett takes on health care reform myths

. . . or as Dr Barrett refers to it more accurately, Insurance Reform. On Friday, Sarah Avery of the News & Observer reported on her interview with the now-retired Pennsylvania psychiatrist who started the Quackwatch.com website in 1996 following years of investigating fraudulent health practices. From the Quackwatch Mission Statement: Quackwatch is now an international network of people who are concerned about health-related frauds, myths, fads, fallacies, and misconduct. Its primary focus is on quackery-related information that is difficult or impossible to get elsewhere. Founded by…

A little game for Monday morning

Got the Monday blues? Then find five minutes to brighten your day by playing what I call spot-the-slander on the Heartland Institute's list of "500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming." The rules are simple: 1. Open the PDF that lists the scientists who agree with the proposition outlined on the page linked above search the file for a popular research institution at which climatologists are employed. For example: "NASA." 2. When you get a hit, copy and paste the name of the researcher associated with that institution into a reliable internet search engine. In the…

Has global warming stopped? I'm glad you asked...

The question comprises the headline of an essay in the New Statesman from David Whitehouse, a former BBC science editor and astronomer ;;;; not someone easily dismissed as a psuedoskeptical crank. His argument getting a lot of traction, and I've even been asked "is this legit?" The answer is ... No. Whitehouse, of course, says it has stopped. Otherwise, he wouldn't have asked the question. But the flaw in his argument appears early in the essay: The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001.Global warming has, temporarily or…

Why Bali will be another missed opportunity

There is almost no chance the Bali round of negotiations, which get underway this week, will actually accomplish anything of consequence. Mostly because the United States has no stomach for mandatory greenhouse gas emission caps, but also because too many people still can't get their minds around the numbers involved in climate change. CNN predicts "lengthy and contentious negotiations on how best to combat global warming." That's putting it mildly. For example, take this sentence from the just-released United Nations Development Program's 2007 Human Development Report: "On the basis of…

What divides science bloggers?

Half of the Scienceblogging team converged on New York City this past weekend to do what science geeks do best: drink someone else's beer and wine and argue about the allegedly non-overlapping magisteria (the science-religion divide to the rest of you). Of course, we talked a lot of science, but we tended to agree on most everything and there wasn't much in the way of genuine debate -- except when it came to how to deal with people of faith. Even those who didn't make it to New York seemed plugged in; witness Matt Nisbet's post explaining "Why the New Atheist Noise Machine Fails," which in…

Adam, Eve and Al Gore

I really didn't set out to keep writing about Al Gore. I mean, he's a good guy, and all. But there are more important things to worry about in the battle between science and superstition. Nevertheless the most active post on the ScienceBlogs at the moment is one in which PZ Myers decries Gore's alleged belief in creationism and suggests that this is undermining the famous climate change slide show. In reality, Gore is not a creationist and PZ seems to have swallowed an apocryphal report to the contrary. I'm one of Gore's army of 1,000 slide show presenters. I've shown the offending slide, in…

Have we oversold climate change?

I hope the answer is yes, in the sense that I don't want to see the even the mid-case scenarios come to pass. But this is a legitimate question, coming out of the American Geophysical Union meeting. Kevin Vranes says he senses a growing feeling that maybe climate scientists have gone a bit too far: We tried for years - decades - to get them to listen to us about climate change. To do that we had to ramp up our rhetoric. We had to figure out ways to tone down our natural skepticism (we are scientists, after all) in order to put on a united face. We knew it would mean pushing the science harder…

The Christmas Calorie

Over this past semester I've discovered something unfortunate. If a person doesn't get much exercise, snacks when bored, and shops when hungry, that person will tend to gain weight. That person is of course me, and so I'm going to try to do something about it. It's by no means a new year's resolution, I've been aware of the problem for several months now. And fortunately we're early in the game yet. My BMI is roughly 25.5, which is just a hair into the "overweight" range. Some of you might be in the same boat, so we might be able to do some thinking about how to best put ourselves where…

Guest posts?

This guest post from James Kakalios got me thinking — if anyone wants to take advantage of this prominent platform I've lucked into for the purpose of publishing their views, I'd be willing to give them an occasional opportunity. I wouldn't want to turn the place into wall-to-wall other people (it's mine, dangit!), but something from some other voice now and then would be OK. I'm going to set a few rules, though. No commercials, and this isn't Craigslist. Don't send me press releases, either. Opinion pieces and entertaining summaries of your exciting research are fine. Don't expect to get…

Ecological Design/The ecoMOD Project

Another way to seek solutions to carbon emissions and over-consumption without going nuclear. Prior posts on the same subject: tidal power, DG, campus sustainability, solar investments, ecological footprints, and consumption more generally. Around Grounds here (they call it "Grounds," not campus, and don't ask), the leaders in ecological innovation are architecture, urban design, and engineering. Probably in that order. William McDonough, he of Cradle-to-Cradle and ecological sustainability design fame, used to be the Dean of the Architecture School, and now runs his company (McDonough…

"New Technological Breakthrough To Fix Problems Of Previous Breakthrough" [an old school reprint]

Or, Has anyone heard of The Onion? Of course you haven't. Dave and I are the only ones who know about it. (What an oddly reminiscent introductory trope?) Dave has a mandate that we meet a quota of Onion references. To do my part, and since I've been lagging behind, I offer this reprint from a few years ago. This one's about "the biggest breakthrough in biotechnology since the breakthrough it fixes." A Texas A&M chemist works on the breakthrough. The article is pasted, beneath the fold... May 9, 2001 | Issue 37â¢17 COLLEGE STATION, TX-Agricultural scientists around the world are…

Mosquitoes harmonise their buzzing in love duets

To our ears, the buzz of a mosquito is intensely irritating and a sign of itchiness to come, but to theirs, it's a lover's serenade. The high-pitched drone of a female is a siren's song that attracts male mosquitoes. And a new study shows that when the two love-bugs meet, they perform a duet, matching each other's buzzing frequency  with careful precision. The female Aedes aegypti mosquito (the carrier of both dengue and yellow fever) beats her wings with a fundamental frequency of about 400Hz, producing a pitch just slightly lower than concert A. Males on the other hand, have a  fundamental…

The Physics of Curling

Unfortunately it's rarely on TV more than once every four years, but I have to say I've really gotten to curling. Not only is it interesting to watch, it looks like it's actually a sport that could be played for fun at the beginning level. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of curling in Texas for some reason, so I have to content myself with watching. And thinking about the physics. The goal in curling is to end each round with your stones closest to the center of the ring. From the release point to the center of the ring is about 97 feet or so. Friction with the ice…

Sunday Function

Sometimes in math we'll understand one aspect of a problem very well, while at the same time we understand another aspect of a problem very poorly. For instance, take the prime numbers. According to the prime number theorem, the number of prime numbers below x is approximately given by: Where pi(x) is the prime counting function and ln(x) is the natural logarithm. As you keep counting your way up the number line, you'll encounter more and more primes. They thin out and become more and more rare, but nonetheless there's an infinite number of them as you keep going. The number that you…

Failures of Cuteness in Physics (UPDATED)

You're all familiar with Dr. Isis, also of ScienceBlogs? She likes cute things. She likes science. Despite the fact that I'm a so-square-I'm-practically-cubic reactionary, I like both of those things too. But when physicists try to make their physics cute it's a cringe-worthy disaster waiting to happen. In the mail today was a flier from the city municipal water supply. It contained information about the various tested properties of the city water, including contaminant levels and that sort of thing. Among the properties listed was: Diluted Conductance: 882 μmhos/cm *Cringe* What they'…