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Warming Stopped in 1998

This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic. Objection: Global temperatures have been trending down since 1998. Global Warming is over. Answer: At the time, 1998 was a record high year in both the CRU and the NASA GISS analysis.  In fact, it was not just a record year, it blew away the previous record by .2oC. (That previous record went all the way back to 1997, by the way!) According to NASA, it was elevated far above the trend line because 1998 was the year of the strongest El Nino of the…

Classic Edition: Stronger Than Old Hapless Gods

I was scheduled for a deeply unpleasant medical test yesterday, which I thought was going to leave me lots of time for blogging. yesterday afternoon and this morning. The preliminary test turned out to be so unpleasant (if anybody ever offers to stick a tube through your nose into your stomach, decline politely) that I didn't go through with the test, and, in fact, was kind of wiped out all last night. Hence, yesterday's light blogging, and today's lazy blogging. One of the controversial things that China Miéville said on the Readercon panels I went to was to sort of dismiss the whole idea…

Science is Utterly Wet

Posting has been (relatively) light this week because today was the first day of classes. I'm teaching introductory modern physics (relativity and quantum mechanics), a class that I've taught before, but I've been putting a significant amount of time into revising my lecture notes, to keep the class from getting stale. This has led to a reduction in blogging because I've been preoccupied with educational matters. Happily, PZ Myers comes along with a post about education. It's one of those chain-letter sort of posts, starting with an op-ed by Olivia Judson with some unkind words about high…

Weekend Diversion: The Top 10 Forests in the World

"But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything." -Alan Watts As we move farther away from the equinox and towards the solstice, my part of the world is seeing not only more daylight, but also more sunshine, warmer temperatures, and -- at least today -- some glorious days to be out in nature. This weekend, have a listen to Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Ronu Majumdar, Sabir Khan & Tarun Bhattacharya's interpretive nature song, Flame of the Forest, while I share with you my list of the…

Messier Monday: The Beehive Cluster / Praesepe, M44

"This holiday season is about remembering that the greatest gift was not laid under a tree, but in a filthy manger." -Unknown But it isn't the manger you're thinking of that I want to share with you this Messier Monday. Although Charles Messier's catalogue of 110 deep sky objects -- designed to pinpoint nebulae that could possibly be confused for potential comets -- is composed mostly of objects only visible through a telescope, a few of them are visible under good seeing conditions to the naked eye, and have been known since ancient times. Image credit: Finotto Enrico, 2011 / flickr user…

Messier Monday: The Lagoon Nebula, M8

"I hate that expression, 'fusion.' What it means to me is this movement where nothing ever really fused." -Wayne Kramer Welcome to another Messier Monday, where each week, I pick one of the 110 Messier Objects -- deep-sky objects catalogued to avoid confusion for comet hunters -- to highlight and detail. Image(s) credit: SEDS -- http://messier.seds.org/. This week, I'd like to highlight one of only two star-forming nebulae visible to the naked eye in the night sky, and I want to do it before it disappears completely for the year! Visible for just an hour or so after sunset right now towards…

Who voted how and why in the Democratic New Hampshire Primary?

I'm looking at an exit poll by NBC and I have thoughts. Gender Gap Much has been made of the fact that Sanders got 55% of female votes, more than 44% for Clinton. That is indeed significant. But little has been said about the fact that among males, 66% voted for Sanders and 32% for Clinton. (55% of the Democratic Primary voters were female, 45% male.) Race/Ethnicity 93% of the Democratic Primary voters were white, 2% black, and the numbers are so small that almost nothing can be said about this important distinction among voters. This is unfortunate because this will impact several…

Do more planets, gas and stars mean less dark matter?

"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special." -Stephen Hawking You're probably familiar with the standard picture of our Universe. You've heard it all before: that the Universe we know of -- stars, planets, atoms, etc. -- is less than 5% of the Universe's total energy. That most of the matter is dark matter, and that most of the energy in the Universe isn't matter at all, but dark energy. But recently, we've started to discover a couple of interesting things about the atoms in the…

Japan Earthquake & Tsunami: Relief and Charity!

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?" -Rabbi Hillel As you all know, it has been one week since the devastating earthquake first struck Japan. And the damage is simply horrific. The death toll is in the thousands (if not the tens of thousands), there are hundreds of aftershocks still ongoing, and over 350,000 people have been displaced from their homes. National geographic has some heartbreaking pictures here. And although I haven't asked it of you in years, my dear readers, I am asking you now to join with me and help the…

Monaghan's Town Constitutional?

I have been meaning to write more about Tom Monaghan's new Florida town, Ave Maria, for a while now. Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, is building an entire town near Naples, Florida, and according to numerous news reports, he plans to make it into, essentially, his own little theocracy. No business would be allowed to open unless it agrees to follow his rules, among which are that no business may offer things which he deems to be immoral according to his conservative Catholic beliefs. That means no medical clinics that perform abortions. Heck, it means no distribution of birth control,…

Dembski Finally Responds....Kind Of

It seems that William Dembski can be shamed into more obfuscation, but can't be shamed into actually being honest. First, a little background. On October 29th, Dembski posted an item on his blog in which he claimed the following: Ask yourself why, after submitting almost 200 pages of materials against me in his expert witness report and after submitting to a deposition with the Thomas More Law Center in July, Jeffrey Shallit did not take the witness stand in Dover for the plaintiffs. Answer: his obsessiveness against me and ID made him a liability to the ACLU. Clearly, the implication here is…

Analysis of Behe's Testimony, Part 1: Purpose and Function

I'm going to make a series of posts breaking down the testimony of Michael Behe in the Dover trial. The transcript for the direct examination and the first part of the cross examination are available now. Behe is really the only science witness the defense has in this case, with Dembski having been withdrawn earlier, and he is crucial to the defense's argument that ID is a genuine scientific theory. Unfortunately for them, Behe crashed and burned badly under cross examination. One inconsistency after another was picked up on and magnified, and you can see in the transcript how questions were…

Science and Naturalism

In the conversations with Ilona, one point has come up repeatedly and I wanted to address it in more detail. This is the question of the role of naturalism in science. Ilona, and Rusty as well, fail to understand the distinction between methodological naturalism(MN) and philosophical naturalism(PN). This is not surprising, because the literature of IDCs and mainstream creationists ignores the distinction completely. Phillip Johnson, in particular, is maddening in his tendency to equate the two. But there is a very big difference between the two. Science employs MN despite the fact that a…

Music of the Birds. And more!

Music of the Birds by Lang Elliott is a classic book and CD combo well over 10 years old, that provided bird lovers with a chance to learn to identify and appreciate the songs of numerous species. Over the last decade or so many other CD-based bird song offerings have become available. More recently, Lang teamed up with Marie Read to produce an iBook (iAuthored) version of Music of the Birds which takes advantage of the iAuthored iBook format in many ways. This is my first review of an iAuthored book, and obviously the first one on this blog, so I want to use the opportunity to discuss what…

U of Iowa faculty petition against ID released

...and has spawned some press coverage, here in the Ames Tribune and here in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, making us the first state to have faculty from all Regent universities speak out against intelligent design. I'll briefly address some of the comments. In the first article, U of I physics professor (and signer of the DI's "Scientific dissent from Darwinism" petition) Fred Skiff elaborates one giant strawman: "It's part of science to consider what blinders you might be wearing," Skiff said. "Materialists put conditions on science that things can only exist if they satisfy materialism. I…

Well there seems to be an absence of a certain ornithological piece: a headline regarding mass awareness of a certain avian influenza variety...

Family Guy, S07E02 'I Dream of Jesus': Peter: Brian, can I see that paper for a sec? (Brian gives Peter the paper. Peter peruses the paper.) Peter: Huh... that's odd... I thought that would big news. Brian: You thought what would be big news? Peter: Well there seems to be an absence of a certain ornithological piece: a headline regarding mass awareness of a certain avian variety. Brian: What are you talking about? Peter: Oh have you not heard? It was my understanding that everyone had heard... Brian: Heard what? Stewie: Brian Don't! Peter: OH WELL THE BIRD, BIRD, BIRD, BIRD BIRD IS THE WORD.…

On Basketball

While in the past, I've written a bunch about basketball here, I've been unusually silent on the subject this year, confining my commentary to the occasional Links Dump item from Grantland and other sites. This isn't because the past season was not noteworthy-- indeed, it was a rather eventful year for Syracuse basketball, with the best record in school history, but a good deal of turmoil off the court. It's just that I've been too busy to watch basketball, let alone blog about it. I did manage to catch all or part of several Syracuse games, though not as many as I would've liked, because…

On the Broadening of Impact

I didn't pay that much attention to the mini-controversy over the NSF's proposed revision of its grant evaluation criteria when they were first released, because I was working on the book. I was asked to say something about it yesterday, though, and having gone to the trouble, I might as well say something on the blog, too. The main source of complaint is the "Broader Impacts" section of the grant, a category that has always been sort of nebulous, but which the new standards attempt to clarify: Collectively, NSF projects should help to advance a broad set of important national goals,…

PNAS: Brad Holden, Observatory Astronomer

p>(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Brad Holden, of the University of California Observatories (which, OK, is affiliated with an academic institution, but this is not a traditional faculty-type job). The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I am an astronomer at an observatory, specifically the University of California Observatories. Our…

How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser

I heard David Kaiser talk about the history of quantum foundations work back in 2008 at the Perimeter Institute, and while I didn't agree with everything he said, I found it fascinating. So when I heard that he had a book coming out about this stuff, How the Hippies Saved Physics, I jumped at the chance to get a review copy. This is, in essence, a book-length argument that I owe Frijtof "Tao of Physics" Capra, Gary "Dancing Wu Li Masters" Zukav, and even J*ck S*rf*tt* a beer. The book expands on things that Kaiser said in that PI talk (which was really good-- you could do worse than to spend…

Faith is not a prerequisite for science

Paul Davies has written a curious op-ed that has been blithely published by the New York Times. I'm not sure why the NYT saw fit to publish it, except that Davies does have a reputation as a popularizer of physics, and as something of an apologist for deism; they certainly couldn't have chosen to print it on its merits. His argument is the tired and familiar claim that science has to be taken on faith, so it's just like religion. I recall hearing variants on this back in the schoolyard, usually punctuated with "nyaa nyaas" and assertions about each others' mothers, and while we may not have…

Ten Years Before the Blog: 2008-2009

In which the great blog recap rolls on to probably the most important event of the last ten years: the arrival of SteelyKid. And a bunch of other bloggy stuff. ------------ There's really no question what should be the featured image for this recap post: Clearly, it needs to be an early photo of SteelyKid, who arrived not quite four years ago, and soon made friends with Appa the stuffed sky-bison. Sadly, we haven't been very good about doing regular pictures of The Pip, mostly because it's so exhausting to keep up with the two of them. Of course, regular blogging continued as well. This seems…

Excellent Approximations and Lying to Children

In which I talk about the common complaint that we teach students physics that "isn't true," and the limits on that statement. ------------ Frequent commenter Ron sent me an email pointing to this post by David Reed on "What we “know” that t’aint so…. and insist on teaching to kids!": he science we teach is pretty old. Mostly 19th century ideas about the world around us are taught as “facts” with little but anecdotal data to support it. We teach it via an ontology that replays the history of science, thus the newest and most powerful scientific understandings are viewed as “too advanced”. If…

What Does It Take to Evaluate Teaching?

In which we compare a couple of different systems for evaluating teachers, looking at what's involved in doing a fair assessment of a teacher's performance. -------- Another casualty of the great blog upgrade, in the sense of a post that was delayed until the inspiration for it has been forgotten by most of the people who might want to talk about it, was this Grant Wiggins post on accountability systems: [The Buckingham, Browne, and Nichols prep school where he taught in the 80's] had a state of the art teacher performance appraisal system back in the 80’s (we’ll need current or recent folks…

Between Migdol and the Sea

Between Migdol and the Sea is the book, by Carl Drews, of the paper Dynamics of Wind Setdown at Suez and the Eastern Nile Delta, by Carl Drews and Weiqing Han. Just so you don't get confused, its subtitled "Crossing the Red Sea with Faith and Science". Those with long memories will recall the Great Fuss and Part II four years ago when the paper was first published. Since I was nice then, Carl asked if I'd like a copy of the book, and I said yes. [Update: the original comments to PZ's posts were lost; now they are found, and part 2. Re-reading the comments at P, I'm again struck by the…

Sunday Chess Problem

Well, the final snow tally in my neck of the woods was a little over two feet. Impressive! On the other hand, there doesn't seem to have been much damage. There were no strong winds, we never lost power, and all of my trees seem to be intact. And it means I get another snow day tomorrow! Cleaning up after two feet of snow takes some time. I think my students might forget who I am. In other news, it seems that the Grand Mufti in Saudi Arabia is not fond of chess. A video clip of Saudi Arabia's top cleric saying that the game of chess is “forbidden” in Islam because it wastes time and…

What About Peiser?

This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic. Objection: Sure, Oreskes found no one bucking the consensus, but her paper was overturned by Benny Peiser who did the exact same study and found very different results. Answer: True, Benny Peiser did attempt a similar study and submitted it as a letter to Science responding to the Oreske study. But for very good reasons, it was not published. Peiser claimed to find 34 articles that fell into his "reject or doubt the consensus view" category. This is…

The Physics of Sunsets

"It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it." -Carl Sagan I would argue the exact opposite, in fact: the beauty of a sunset, in all of its varieties and variations, is only enhanced the more you know about it. Image credit: Dan Schroeder, via Picasa. The next time you watch the Sun descend through the sky, towards the horizon, you might marvel at how the Sun remains the same size all the way down. At just slightly over half-a-degree, the Sun appears to drop at a constant rate throughout the afternoon and into early evening. But there are some small changes…

Every Picture Tells a Story

So, what's the deal with that graph I was talking about the other day? I sort of left it hanging at the end, there, but I ought to actually interpret the figure. It also serves as a nice and fairly simple illustration of how physicists approach experimental data. Here's a newer version of the plot in question, made using more recent data: shows the fluorescence signal detected in our metastable atoms source as a function of the gas pressure on the source inlet. There's a clear peak in the data at a pressure of 60-70 milliTorr (ignore that one point flying way up above all the others-- that's…

The Path to Woo

My pseudonymous colleague Orac makes it part of his mission to lampoon "alternative medicine" wherever he encounters it, so this may well piss him off: For the last several weeks, I've been taking a daily dose of pseudoscience. Why? I blame the medical establishment, but you're going to have to click below the fold to find out why. As I've mentioned here several times, back in January, I started having very bad heartburn more or less constantly. After a couple of visits to my doctor, I was referred to a gastroenterologist, who scheduled an endoscopy, and then proclaimed that I have "gastro-…

Pursuit of Perfection

I'm going to be in the Boston area this weekend, visiting Kate's family, so I will end up watching Saturday night's Giants-Patriots game with my Patriot-fan in-laws. In case you didn't know, New England is currently 15-0, and if they win this game they have the chance to be the first team to ever finish the regular season 16-0 (and the second to go undefeated in the regular season, after the 14-0 Miami Dolphins of 1972). Of course, if you don't know that, you're probably also a little hazy on the rules of football, so you probably want to give this post a miss, and go read something else. I…

When Should You Open Your Car Windows? An Experiment

Back at the start of the summer, I asked a question about automotive thermodynamics: On a hot day, is it better to open your car windows a crack when making a short stop, or leave them closed? For a long term-- say, leaving your car parked outside all day-- I hope everyone will agree that leaving the windows slightly open is the better call, but the answer isn't as clear for a short stop. There might well be some time during which the open-window car heats up faster as warm air from outside gets in, while the closed-window car holds in the air-conditioned goodness longer. It occurred to me…

Photons: Still Bosons

Last week, Dmitry Budker's group at Berkeley published a paper in Physical Review Letters (also free on the arxiv) with the somewhat drab title "Spectroscopic Test of Bose-Einsten Statistics for Photons." Honestly, I probably wouldn't've noticed it, even though this is the sort of precision AMO test of physics that I love, had it not been for the awesome press release Berkeley put together, and this image in particular (grabbed with its caption): This is a nifty paper, and deserves a little explanation in Q&A format: Is this another New Scientist style "Einstein was wrong" paper? No. If…

Ted Kennedy 1932 - 2009

It has been said that everyone who grew up or lived in Kennedy country has at least one Kennedy story. This is true, of course, though mine are not especially impressive. But since this is a wake, you have to hear them anyway. Grab yourself a beer and a plate of steamed clams while I regale you.... When I was growing up, the presumption in my household was firm that Ted Kennedy would run for president at some point, and win, and be a great president, starting with the day his brother Robert was killed (if not before). As a result, I have a memory of Ted Kennedy as part of the…

Musings on the Aquatic Ape Theory

The Aquatic Ape Theory is being discussed over at Pharyngula. As PZ points out, an excellent resource on this idea is Moore's site on the topic. Here, I just want to make a few remarks about it. The Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT) is a human evolution Theory of Everything (TOE) and thus explains, as it should, everything. That is a dangerous way for a theory to act, because if it tries to explain everything then it is going to be wrong in a number of places, and it is going to seem (or even be) right in a number of places but only by chance. (Unless, of course, the TOE is totally rad and really…

I personally put Al Franken in the Senate

Al Franken is about to be seated as the Junior Senator from Minnesota after a long and costly battle between loser Norm Coleman and Senator Franken. Al won the election by just a few hundred votes, and three of those votes are mine. So, we have me and about 100 other people just like me to thank for overthrowing the Coleman Regime. Let this be a lesson to all of you who have the opportunity to vote and do not, or who have the opportunity to go out and work for a few hours for a candidate but do not. You are missing out. How did I get three (or maybe more) votes for Al? Well, one of them…

Topi or not Topi ...

Go to any bar and you'll see a lot of males standing and sitting around not mating. I'll bet you would have guessed that the reason they are not mating is that no females will mate with them for one reason or another. But there is the distinct possibility that they are very inconspicuously resisting mating opportunities. It turns out that males can do this .... avoid mating without conspicuous resistance ... more easily than females. For obvious reasons. This could be why what has become (inappropriately) known as "reversed sexual aggression" often goes unnoticed, and a recent study of the…

Topi or not Topi ...

Go to any bar and you'll see a lot of males standing and sitting around not mating. I'll bet you would have guessed that the reason they are not mating is that no females will mate with them for one reason or another. But there is the distinct possibility that they are very inconspicuously resisting mating opportunities. It turns out that males can do this .... avoid mating without conspicuous resistance ... more easily than females. For obvious reasons. This could be why what has become (inappropriately) known as "reversed sexual aggression" often goes unnoticed, and a recent study of the…

Craig's Five Ways, Part Two

Let's resume our discussion of this article, by William Lane Craig, in which he presents five arguments for belief in God. We found his first two arguments to be inadequate. Do his other three fare any better? 3. God provides the best explanation of objective moral values and duties. Even atheists recognize that some things, for example, the Holocaust, are objectively evil. But if atheism is true, what basis is there for the objectivity of the moral values we affirm? Evolution? Social conditioning? These factors may at best produce in us the subjective feeling that there are objective…

More Gibberish About Thermodynamics

Over at Uncommon Descent, there's a bit of a kerfuffle going on about the second law of thermodynamics. Salvador Cordova got the ball rolling back in July with this barn-burner of a post excoriating his fellow ID proponent Granville Sewell for making bad thermodynamical arguments: ID proponents and creationists should not use the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics to support ID. Appropriate for Independence Day in the USA is my declaration of independence and disavowal of 2nd Law arguments in support of ID and creation theory. Any student of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics will likely find…

Not seeing the forest through the trees: Microbiomes and Obesity

We are fat. We are really, really fat. While some people are overweight/obese for very real medical conditions (thyroid issues, side-effects of medications, etc), the fact of the matter is, most of us just eat/drink too much crap and we live sedentary lifestyles. That doesnt mean that we actually acknowledge this. There is no shortage of excuses for the obesity epidemic. Even the CDC, who has a nice list of suggestions, cant resist passing the personal-responsibility-buck: # It is often easier and cheaper to get less healthy foods and beverages. # Foods high in sugar, fat, and salt are…

Blackburn on Religion and Respect

This paper (PDF format) by British philosopher Simon Blackburn is getting some attention in the blogosphere. Let's have a look. Blackburn addresses the question of what it means to respect religion, from the perspective of an atheist. The essay is perfect, by which I mean that it says exactly what I think needs to be said on this issue. Particularly important is the distinction between different kinds of respect: `Respect' of course is a tricky term. I may respect your gardening by just letting you get on with it. Or, I may respect it by admiring it and regarding it as a superior way…

Cosmos F*$&ing Loves Science

The fourth episode of the Cosmos reboot aired last night, and as I said on Twitter it was a beautiful demonstration of why I'm finding this show intensely frustrating. There were flashes of brilliance, but also quite a few bits that left me shaking my head. Thus fitting the pattern of the previous episodes-- I didn't comment on last week's, because I was taking a break, but it had the same sorts of issues, too-- so I guess that's just what this show is. Again, there was some very good stuff-- the opening framing device with William Herschel talking about ghosts was great, and Tyson's tour…

Miscellaneous Liberal Education Stuff

The posts on box-checking and liberal arts teaching generated a fair number of comments that I haven't really had time to address individually, across a few different social media platforms. So I'm going to collect some of the more important stuff here, in one catch-up post. --A few people, mostly in places that aren't conducive to linking, raised versions of "You never know what will be useful" as a justification for having a list of boxes to check. And I don't entirely disagree with that. I'm not against the idea of forcing students to take a broader range of stuff than they otherwise might…

Monday Math: The Euler Product for the Zeta Function

In this week's edition of Monday Math we look at what I regard as one of the prettiest equations in number theory. Here it is: \[ \sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{1}{n^s} = \prod_p \left( \frac{1}{1-\frac{1}{p^s}}\right) \]   Doesn't it just make your heart go pitter-pat? You are probably familiar with the big sigma notation for sums. The big pi indicates an infinite product. In this case the product is indexed over the primes. In other words, the product contains one factor for each prime. There is something very counter-intuitive in this equation, which is a large part of why I find it so…

Unscientific America on Jobs in Science

The most unfortunate thing about the furor over Unscientific America is that the vast majority of the shouting concerns a relatively small portion of the actual argument of the book. Far too much attention is being spent on the question of whether Chris and Sheril are fair to Myers and Dawkins, and not nearly enough is spent on the (to my mind more important) sections about political and media culture. Which is a shame, because unlike most bloggers, they make some fairly concrete suggestions about what ought to be done to address the problems they describe. In particular, they make a fairly…

Everybody Thinks Scientifically

Everybody's favorite science blogger did a podcast with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and has been posting highlights of it. One of these, on scientific thinking, has a bit that I don't quite agree with. Tyson says: I think the, if it were natural to think scientifically, science as we currently practice it would have been going on for thousands of years. But it hasn't. It's relatively late in the activities of a culture. Science as we now practice it...this is a relatively modern, that's been going on for no more than 400 years. And you look at how long civilizations have been around, and you say,…

The ABC's of AMO Physics

Over at Confused at a Higher Level, Melissa offers an alphabetical list of essential supplies for a condensed matter experimentalist at a small college. This is a fun idea for back-to-school time, so I'll steal it, and offer the following alphabetical list of essentials for Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics at a small college, kind of a condensed version of the three part series I did a few weeks ago. A is for Acousto-optic modulator This is a device that uses sound waves in a crystal to deflect light and shift its frequency. It's essential for rapid control of laser properties. B is for…

Rule 1 of Writing: Try Not to Sound Like a Doofus

Via somebody on Twitter, Copyblogger has a post titled "7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School," which is, as you might guess, dedicated to provocatively contrarian advice about how to write, boldly challenging the received wisdom of English faculty: What is good writing? Ask an English teacher, and they'll tell you good writing is grammatically correct. They'll tell you it makes a point and supports it with evidence. Maybe, if they're really honest, they'll admit it has a scholarly tone -- prose that sounds like Jane Austen earns an A, while a paper that could've been written by Willie…

The Law of Burger Attraction

I'm sitting at the dining room table eating lunch, when I get the feeling of being watched. I look around, and see the dog across the room, curled up on her pillows staring at me. She's quietly chanting to herself "I get stuff. I get stuff. I get stuff." "You're not trying that hypnosis thing again, are you?" I ask. "You know it won't work." "No. I'm manipulating the wavefunction of the universe to bring me good things. Such as, for example, that cheeseburger you're eating." "Really. Manipulating the wavefunction of the universe?" "Really. You see, all conscious beings are surrounded by an…