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Mostly Mute Monday: Our Nearest Galaxy In Three Unique Views (Synopsis)

“Our knowledge of stars and interstellar matter must be based primarily on the electromagnetic radiation which reaches us. Nature has thoughtfully provided us with a universe in which radiant energy of almost all wave lengths travels in straight lines over enormous distances with usually rather negligible absorption.” -Lyman Spitzer, Jr. There's nothing quite like looking at a galaxy, all aglow with the light from billions upon billions of stars shining at once. Some reaches our eyes, some is obscured by light-blocking dust, and all of it comes together to give a spectacular sight. Image…

Mostly Mute Monday: Out Of The Darkness (Synopsis)

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” -Edgar Allan Poe Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we've learned for a certainty that the black abyss of empty space isn't really so empty. Far beyond what we can perceive with our naked eye (or even ground-based telescopes), galaxies exist and go on for tens of billions of light years. Image credit: Digitized Sky Survey (DSS), STScI/AURA, Palomar/Caltech, and UKSTU/AAO, via http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2010/01/image/h/. So what…

Throwback Thursday: The closest invisible lights (Synopsis)

“As a boy I believed I could make myself invisible. I’m not sure that I ever could, but I certainly had the ability to pass unnoticed.” -Terence Stamp When you take a look at the stars visible in the night sky, you're only seeing a tiny fraction of what's actually present in our galaxy. Your intuition would tell you that you're probably seeing the closest stars to Earth, but that's only partially right. Image credit: Richard Powell of http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/. Of the ten closest star systems in the night sky, only two of them are visible to the naked eye, and if we start to…

Weekend Diversion: The Simplest Solution to Rising CO2 (Synopsis)

“I believe that we are here for each other, not against each other. Everything comes from an understanding that you are a gift in my life — whoever you are, whatever our differences.” -John Denver So why not lead by example? If you think there's too much carbon in the atmosphere (because there is), if you think the Earth is undergoing global warming and climate change because of it (which the science says it is), and you think that you want to live in a time and place where the natural world is healthy, as John Denver would sing you in his classic song, Take Me Home Country Roads, maybe…

Memory Monday: Our Universe Changes (Synopsis)

“Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” -Carl Sagan 34 years ago, Carl Sagan became the first person to present -- in a format accessible to the entire world -- a synthesized story of all the most important scientific points and facts that we had learned about the cosmic story common to us all. Image credit: NASA / GSFC, via http://cosmictimes.gsfc.nasa.gov/universemashup/archive/pages/big_bang…. No…

Messier Monday: A Titan in a Teapot, M69 (Synopsis)

“Ancients knew that you need guidance, patronage and protection as you move from one place or state to another, whenever you cross a bridge.” -Richard Rohr When you think about the stars in the sky, it takes some study to realize that the bluest, brightest stars are also the shortest lived. So when we look at a cluster of stars -- or any stellar population -- we can figure out how old it is by looking at the color and magnitude of the brightest, bluest main-sequence stars that are still alive. Image credit: © 2005–2009 by Rainer Sparenberg; photo by R.Sparenberg, S.Binnewies, V.Robering;…

Throwback Thursday: The greatest supernovae that no one saw (Synopsis)

“When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.” -Tycho Brahe The Milky Way is home to many of the greatest sights ever to grace the night sky, including some spectacular, transient objects: supernovae! Formed from the death of supermassive stars or the "second-chance" explosions of white dwarfs, they brighten incredibly and then fade away, leaving spectacular remnants (and a plethora of heavy, enriched elements) behind. Image credit: NASA, ESA and…

Water In Space: Does It Freeze Or Boil? (Synopsis)

“You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.” –Rabindranath Tagore You can’t answer a hypothetical question for certain, at least in science, without doing the experiment for yourself. Here on Earth, liquid water is plentiful; our planet has the stable temperatures and pressures that water needs to exist in its liquid state. Other planets aren't so lucky: with a thin or negligible atmosphere, you can only have solid ice or gaseous water vapor. The gravitational pull on the gases in our atmosphere cause a substantial surface pressure, giving rise to liquid oceans.…

How the Universe changed in 2016 (Synopsis)

"We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person." -W. Somerset Maugham After 13.8 billion years have gone by, you might not think that a year makes much of a difference. A year to the Universe is like 0.2 seconds -- the literal blink of an eye -- to a human being. Yet even though changes might be gradual, they’re real, and they very much add up over time. A region of the Orion Nebula, one of the largest and most rapidly-star-forming regions where star birth takes place. Image credit: NASA, ESA and…

An X-ray Surprise! When Black Holes Stop Eating, Galaxies Fade Away (Synopsis)

"I'll never, ever be full. I'll always be hungry. Obviously, I'm not talking about food." -Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson Only a very small percentage of galaxies have active supermassive black holes. While the black holes themselves are common, they only rarely feed, gaining a huge influx of matter to accelerate and send jets and other emission out. When a galaxy does become active, they can appear in any number of interesting manifestations, dependent on their orientation relative to us. The unified model of AGNs/Active Galactic Nuclei. Image credit: Robert Antonucci, aka Ski, of http://web.…

LHC's newest data: a victory for the Standard Model, defeat for new physics

“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” -Lord Kelvin The particle physics ‘nightmare scenario’ was that the LHC at CERN would achieve its desired energies and collision rates, that it would find a single Higgs boson between about 120 and 140 GeV, and that it would see absolutely nothing else. No new particles, no bizarre decays, nothing that couldn’t be accounted for by the Standard Model. With the latest release, that’s exactly what’s happening. The observed Higgs decay channels vs. the Standard Model agreement, with the…

What to watch for when science becomes politicized (Synopsis)

"When a scientist says something, his colleagues must ask themselves only whether it is true. When a politician says something, his colleagues must first of all ask, 'Why does he say it?'" -Leo Szilard There are claims flying around all the time that science is corrupt, politicized, and that the robust scientific conclusions reached about a number of issues are unreliable. Whether it's about vaccines, HIV/AIDS, fluoride, climate change or the genetics of sexuality (or a host of other issues), you will often see the rare scientist who dissents from the mainstream highlighted along with the…

Ask Ethan: Do 234 Sun-Like Stars Show Evidence For Aliens? (Synopsis)

"This isn't my life anymore, Mulder. I'm done chasing monsters in the dark." -Dana Scully, X-files One of the most exciting things a scientist can experience is when they look at a sample of data, expecting to not see a particular exciting effect, and yet, something’s there. Immediately, you have to check yourself: what are all the other things it could be? What are the mundane possibilities that could mimic that effect? And what can I do, if anything, to rule them out? Whenever you have a new idea, your main job, first and foremost, is to try and blow the biggest holes in it you possibly can…

NASA's Impossible Space Engine, The EMdrive, Passes Peer Review (Synopsis)

"All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value." -Carl Sagan For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. While Newton may not be the final word in mechanics anymore since the development of relativity and quantum physics, this law -- better known as the conservation of momentum -- has held up from the 17th century through the 21st in every interaction ever observed. Unless, that is, the EMdrive is everything it claims to be. The surface magnetic field of an…

How did the Universe get its first supermassive black holes? (Synopsis)

"For something to collapse, not all systems have to shut down. In most cases, just one system is enough." -Robert Kiyosaki Do supermassive black holes form from the merger and growth of many smaller black holes, falling towards a cluster/galactic center where they find one another and grow into a behemoth? Or is there a direct-collapse mechanism at play, where a black hole thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of times the mass of our Sun forms spontaneously? The X-ray and optical images of a small galaxy containing a black hole many tens of thousands of times the mass…

Humanity may be alone in the Universe (Synopsis)

"There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery." -Enrico Fermi Given the huge number of stars, planets, and chances at life that the galaxy and the Universe has given us, it seems paradoxical that we haven't yet encountered any form of alien intelligence or even life. The discoveries make in the field of exoplanet studies, particularly by the Kepler mission, make this an even bigger problem than we anticipated: more than 10^22 planets with Earth-like condition…

Is Dark Matter Required For Life To Exist? (Synopsis)

“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” –Joseph Campbell Making up some 85% of the mass in our Universe, dark matter is necessary to explain the motions of individual galaxies, the grouping and clustering of assemblies of galaxies, the large-scale structure of the Universe and more. But on a much closer-to-home level, dark matter may be absolutely essential to the origin of life, too! Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada, of the illustration of the dark matter halo surrounding the luminous disk of our galaxy. Without dark matter, supernova explosions and starburst events would still…

Ask Ethan: Is the Universe expanding faster than expected? (Synopsis)

"Until the 1990s, there were few reliable observations about movement at the scale of the entire universe, which is the only scale dark energy effects. So dark energy could not be seen until we could measure things very, very far away." -Adam Riess Just thirty years ago, scientists argued over the value of the Hubble expansion rate, and what it meant for the age, history and fate of the Universe. Was the Universe expanding slowly (~55 km/s/Mpc), was it very old, and would it coast to infinity? Or was it expanding rapidly (~100 km/s/Mpc), was it young, and would it eventually recollapse?…

How do we know the distance to the stars? (Synopsis)

“Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.” -Carl Sagan Glittering above high overhead, the canopy of night offers thousands of points of light, each one a blazing Sun, starring in the story of its own Solar System. But even armed with that knowledge, it's difficult to calculate exactly how far away such a star would actually be. The brightness/distance relationship is a great start, but stars intrinsically come in different brightnesses,…

99.8% Wrong: How NASA's Fermi Scientists Are Fooling Themselves About Gamma Rays From Black Holes (Synopsis)

"That’s the next step: to simultaneously see [gravitational waves] with three, four or five interferometers, localize it quickly, within minutes, and have other observatories catch it instantly, and catch it in the optical or the X-ray bands. That’s going to provide a whole new understanding in these cataclysmic events." -Dave Reitze, executive director of LIGO On September 14th, 2015, both LIGO detectors in Hanover, WA and Livingston, LA, detected an unambiguous gravitational wave signal from two merging black holes some 1.3 billion light years distant. About 0.4 seconds later, NASA’s Fermi…

Is Stephen Hawking's 'StarShot' really possible? (Synopsis)

"Fundamental physics is like an art more or less. It's completely non-practical, and you can't use it for anything. But it's about the universe and how the world came into being. It's very remote from your daily life and mine, and yet it defines us as human beings." -Yuri Milner In one of the boldest initiatives ever announced, billionaire Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking are working on developing a "Breakthrough Starshot" project, where an advanced laser array will power a sail-driven spacecraft to speeds exceeding 60,000 km/s, taking it to the nearest stars within a single human lifetime. A…

The Discovery Of A Lifetime: Exclusive Interview With David Reitze, Executive Director Of LIGO (Synopsis)

"When I was in high school, I was certain that being an astronaut was my goal. It was a very important time -- Sally Ride was making her first flight into space and she had a real impact on me. Those 'firsts' kind of stick in your head and really become inspirations for you." Karen Nyberg, astronaut On September 14th, less than 72 hours after being activated at its highest sensitivity ever, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) detected its first unambiguous signal in both detectors, a signal that corresponded to the merger of two massive black holes: 36 and 29 solar…

Science is not faith-based, no matter what the Wall Street Journal says (Synopsis)

"The fundamental choice is not whether humans will have faith, but rather what the objects of their faith will be, and how far and into what dimensions this faith will extend." -Matt Emerson Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Matt Emerson asserts that science is faith-based, since scientists believe that the predictions of their theories will be borne out. It's true that faith, by definition, is the belief in an outcome for which we cannot be certain. Indeed, we could not have been certain that LIGO would have found gravitational waves, nor that Einstein's predictions for their properties…

Why does Earth appear blue from space? (Synopsis)

“Whenever I gaze up at the moon, I feel like I’m on a time machine. I am back to that precious pinpoint of time, standing on the foreboding — yet beautiful — Sea of Tranquility. I could see our shining blue planet Earth poised in the darkness of space.” -Buzz Aldrin Seen from afar, Earth is often described as a pale blue dot. But why is our planet blue? Is it because the skies are blue? That can't be right, or the clouds and icecaps would appear blue-hued as well. Is it because the blue skies are reflected by the oceans? That can't be right either, or we wouldn't see different shades of blue…

Astronomers Push The Limits Of Hubble (Synopsis)

"The wonder is, not that the field of stars of so vast, but that man has measured it." -Anatole France If you could gather 250 million times as much light as your eye, and improve your resolution by several orders of magnitude, you just might be able to see what the Hubble Space Telescope can. By extending down into the near-infrared, and combining those observations with that from other great observatories like Chandra and Spitzer, we can probe the star-formation history of the Universe. Image credit: NASA, ESA, the GOODS Team and M. Giavalisco (STScI/University of Massachusetts), of a…

The Future Of Astronomy: The Starshade And Exoplanet Imaging

"We stand on a great threshold in the human history of space exploration. If life is prevalent in our neighborhood of the galaxy, it is within our resources and technological reach to be the first generation in human history to finally cross this threshold, and to learn if there is life of any kind beyond Earth." -Sara Seager 25 years ago, there were no planets known around Sun-like stars other than our own. Just 5 years ago, there were no rocky planets known around Sun-like stars other than our own. And today, we don't have any direct images of those rocky worlds potentially suitable for…

Ask Ethan: How Can We Know If North Korea Is Testing Nuclear Bombs? (Synopsis)

"In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show." -Wilfred Burchett The news has been aflame with reports that North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb on January 6th, greatly expanding its nuclear capabilities with their fourth nuclear test and the potential to carry out a devastating strike against either South Korea or, if they're more ambitious, the United States. Image credit: TV screenshot of CNN’s The…

Kepler Found Its Longest-Period Planet Ever (Synopsis)

"Mars is much closer to the characteristics of Earth. It has a fall, winter, summer and spring. North Pole, South Pole, mountains and lots of ice. No one is going to live on Venus; no one is going to live on Jupiter." -Buzz Aldrin When a planet passes in front of its star from our point of view, that transiting phenomenon can be detected as a dip in starlight. By surveying some 150,000 stars, the Kepler mission has detected close to 10,000 planetary candidates, many of which have been identified by the stellar wobble technique. Image credit: NASA Ames. But this "wobbling" also sometimes…

The Astronaut Hopeful's Manifesto (Synopsis)

“I wasn’t destined to be an astronaut. I had to turn myself into one.” -Chris Hadfield Many of us dream of becoming astronauts as a child, but give up on that dream for a number of reasons — the seemingly impossible odds, the demands of daily life, the rigors of preparation — and never even apply. But for a great many, that dream remains alive; the last time NASA had open applications, over 6,000 people threw their hat in the ring, with eight selected. Image credit: NASA; Photographer: Robert Markowitz. NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, at lectern in the middle of the frame, speaks at a…

Announcing the Uncertain Principles Physics Scholarship Program

In the spirit of the newly clarified regulations governing the Academic Competitiveness Grant and National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grant Programs administered by the Department of Education, I am pleased to announce the Uncertain Principles Physics Scholarship Program. Under this program, I pledge to personally pay the full tuition for any student who is: From a low-income family, or a historically disadvantaged group, Enrolled as a full-time student at an accredited four-year college or university, and Taking courses toward a degree in physics or related…

NFL Week 2

Three comments on the second week of the NFL season: 1) Given that Brett Favre famously lay down to give Michael Strahan the single-season sack record, it seems only fitting that the Giants should roll over to give him the NFL wins record for a QB. If the clock hadn't run out, he probably could've broken the total touchdown record, too-- he only needs three to pass Marino, and God knows, the Giants weren't going to stop him from throwing a TD pass every time the Packers got the ball. 2) I feel for Eli Manning, and not just because I re-aggravated a shoulder separation on Friday (and then…

True Lab Stories: Why I Am Not a Biologist

Every now and then, usually in the summer or early fall, when the sun is shining and it's just pleasant to be outdoors, I find myself almost regretting my career choices. After all, had I chosen a career in the biological sciences, rather than laser physics, I could do my research outside in the nice weather, rather than in a windowless room in the basement. Of course, every now and then, I hear stories like the one in the talk given by a colleague's summer research students a few weeks ago. He's a plant biologist specializing in moss, and his students went out looking for samples to test…

Yoroshiku Onegai Shimasu

I'm sure I'm neither the first nor the last person to note that it probably says something about Japan that the ordinary meet-new-people ritual includes asking them "Please be kind to me." But, you know, sometimes you have to be obvious. Anyway, I'm in Kyoto, typing on a loaner laptop in the hotel lobby. Don't expect a great deal of blogging via this method, because the keyboard is different, and I keep doing something to put it into hiragana mode, which makes a great big mess. The hotel is very nice, though, abd the staff speak excellent English, so I have not needed my abominable Japanese…

Pharyngula Phootball Philes

Since Katie is trying to turn this into a football blog (don't mock it! Have you seen the kinds of traffic numbers the big sports blogs bring in?), here's another football story with a neuro link: a player who credits his recovery from a concussion to a "miracle". It sounds like there is a whole epidemic of foolishness in the NFL. "People get really nervous when they hear someone proclaim their faith boldly," says the Rev. Peter Gallagher, one of the chaplains for the Indianapolis Colts. "So the easy thing to do is make fun of them. That way you won't have to deal with the real questions…

Has Stephen Hawking Friended You?

The Female Science Professor (whose pseudonym I find unwieldy, but I'm not going to make a TLA out of it...) raises an interesting question in describing a language class experience: By far the strangest experience was when we had to show and talk about photographs of our family and friends. Many of the other students got out their laptops and opened their Facebook pages. It was just like what I've read about -- endless flash photos of drunken parties with people hanging off each other whilst holding alcoholic beverages. This might have presented opportunities for learning some words and…

It won't work

Saint Gasoline speculates about a common idea: using a time machine to travel far in the future to reap the benefits of compound interest. It won't work! Lots of bank accounts get abandoned — forgotten, the owner dies, etc., but you don't have a lot of bankers sitting around fretting, "Uh-oh, Marcus Junius Glabrius deposited 15 denarii in 61 BC, and never closed his account. I sure hope he doesn't come strolling in tomorrow, or we'll have to give him Switzerland, France, and a couple of small African nations to cover the interest." No. That's because the bankers sit around watching their…

Antimatter Chemstry (For Small Values of Chemistry)

The AIP Physics News service last week highlighted a new result from the Athena collaboration at CERN with the headline "First Antimatter Chemistry". That conjures images of sticking anti-carbon atoms together to make anti-buckballs, but that's not exactly what's going on... The experiment in the case involves the interaction between anti-protons and molecular hydrogen ions. They slow and trap the anti-protons, and bring them into the same region with the H2+ molecules, and a reaction occurs that pulls the molecule apart, producing a neutral hydrogen atom and something they're calling "…

We're Talkin' 'Bout Practice

When Redskins running back and noted NFL whack job Clinton Portis got injured in a preseason game, he generated a lot of buzz with a press-conference rant about how stupid it is to make players go through pre-season games at all. The sports punditocracy kept the topic alive for pretty much the whole rest of the pre-season, with a good number of commentators agreeing with Portis that there's really no need for veteran players to play pre-season games. A quick scan of the weekend's games might suggest differently. Sloppy play abounded. The Seahawks and Lions didn't manage anything other than…

Class Issues in Perspective

Yes, the unofficial Admissions Policy Month continues here at Uncertain Principles. The problem really is that it's Admissions Season in academia, so all the navel-gazing academic journals are loaded with articles about it, which means that having wandered into talking about it, I can't get out without a major effort of will... Today's worthwhile article is from Inside Higher Ed, where Alan Contreras puts the cost of higher education in perspective in a way that makes the class problem very clear: In 1974, a year of attendance at the University of Oregon (the flagship university in my state)…

Rate Three Professors

Here's the scenario: You are the sole executive authority of Hypothetical College, which has a faculty of three. It's performance evaluation time, and you have $1,500 in bonus money to distribute, in increments of $500 (that is, you can award $0, $500, $1,000, or $1,500 to each faculty member, but the total amount of all the awards can be no more than $1,500). To make this easier, all three of your faculty taught the same number of students, received the same student evaluation scores, and served on the same campus committees, so all you need to do is evaluate their scholarship. Professor A…

The Writing Life

OVer at the Whatever, Senor BaconCat has two long posts on the glamorous life of a successful SF writer: one breaking down his income from SF writing in detail, and the other talking about why he's talking about money. The comment threads are also lively and interesting in their own right. It's particularly funny to see the number of people who are shocked at how low the income is-- $67,000 is a pretty respectable salary in the world of people who don't play around on the Internet all that often, and it's probably in the ninety-somethingth percentile for fiction writers. Of course, I'm amused…

Virtual Journalism

I don't have a lot to add to this link, I just wanted to quote Ethan Zuckerman on virtual journalism, from a post about being interviewed for Pitchfork magazine: The most interesting aspect of the discussion to me was the idea that Chris brought to the table - that we might pay more attention to imagined worlds than to the real one. First, this helped me understand precisely why I find the Second Life hype so disconcerting - I find it deeply odd that journalism is expanding into these illusory spaces (link to Reuters) while it's shrinking in the real world. I think the answer may be that…

Jack McDevitt Interview

Jack McDevitt is a prolific SF author, with a couple of running series that recently appeared in booklog entries here (see, for example, Antiquities Dealers in Spaaaace!!!). Coincidentally, he's also talked to the Slush God, in an interview posted at SciFi Weekly. He says a bunch of interesting stuff, and not just about his books: The problem with space travel is that you don't really get much benefit from it. Not the sort that makes, say, for better transportation or better toothpaste. NASA is always trying to sell it that way, but the money would be better spent developing the toothpaste…

links for 2008-11-23

CHART ATTACK!: 11/24/84 | Popdose "When you're on fire like Lionel Richie in 1984, you can do whatever the hell you want. You can write a song called "Penny Lover," which is not actually about somebody who loves pennies, or even about someone who loves girls named Penny. And you can sit back and watch your song reach the Top 10, without batting an eye. " (tags: music review blogs silly) Cocktail Party Physics: what is physics? "I've been traveling giving a lot of talks lately, and I always ask people I'm visiting what makes physics "physics". Why is biophysics bioPHYSICS and not…

The Monkey Dance

As has already been noted by people with too much free time, my DonorsChoose challenge stands at $6,254. This is a big jump, and happened because somebody emailed to ask whether a donation of theirs had been counted; when I logged in to check, I found that there was $715 in account credits, which I believe are donations that didn't get made to a specific project. I'm not sure how that happened. Anyway, even though I'm not sure of the origin of those (it's possible they're left over from last year), I put them toward the current challenge projects, because it seemed the honest thing to do. If…

The Monkey Dance (DonorsChoose Incentives)

First and foremost, thank you to everybody who has donated to my DonorsChoose challenge this year. At the time of this writing, we've raised just over $1,700, temporarily good enough for first place on the ScieceBlogs leader board. If you haven't contributed yet, we've got lots of incentives to try to get you to contribute. In addition to the various incentives I described this weekend, the Corporate Masters are once again raffling off prizes ranging from magazine subscriptions to an iPod Touch. Janet has the details. If even that's not enough, I said back at the beginning of this that I…

links for 2008-07-30

The Nature of Glass Remains Anything but Clear - NYTimes.com "David A. Weitz, a physics professor at Harvard, joked, "There are more theories of the glass transition than there are theorists who propose them."" (tags: physics materials science) Medium Large It's back! Maybe the best Web comic going. (tags: comics internet silly) Game Over: Scrabulous Shut Down on Facebook - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog What am I going to use for procrastination now? (tags: internet games stupid law) Laser beams are entangled in space - physicsworld.com "[P]hysicists created two entangled…

Whoosh Goes the Randomizer

I'm not organized enough to make this a regular feature, or to use it to divine the future, but every now and then, I get a really good run of songs on the iTunes shuffle, and make a note. Here's a batch from this weekend (with a smattering of comments): "White Russian Galaxy," The Crimea "Be Sweet," The Afghan Whigs "Ain't Wastin' Time No More," The Allman Brothers Band "Papa Was A Rodeo," The Magnetic Fields (You gotta love an ambiguously gay cowboy song...) "Check," Rustic Overtones "Right Next Door (Because of Me) (live at KBCO)," Robert Cray "Total Eclipse of the Heart," Bonnie Tyler (…

How Many Anecdotes Does it Take to Make Data?

The New York Giants, who played all their starters in a "meaningless" game against the Patriots in the final week of the season are now 2-0 in the playoffs. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Indianapolis Colts, and Dallas Cowboys, who played their starters only sparingly at the end of the regular season to "rest up for the playoffs" are now 0-3. I'm pleasantly stunned by the Giants victory. Though it might be better to call it a total meltdown by the Cowboys, who committed a bunch of stupid penalties in the fourth quarter to bail out the Giants' patchwork defense and preserve the victory. Though,…

Math Nerds Need Social Networks, Too

It turns out that there's a Facebook group for quantum information types called the Church of the Larger Hilbert Space after a remark by John Smolin (Facebook link here), which I thought was the nerdiest thing I ever saw. Until I looked at the "Related Groups," and saw "I support the right to choose one element from each set in a collection" (here, if you have access), which is, of course, a political group for people who are Pro-(Axiom-of-)Choice. Who are, of course, opposed by "The Axiom of Life (aka Negation of Axiom of Choice)" (here). Both of those are nerdier than the Church of the…