I linked to this on Twitter, where people enjoyed it. Don’t want folks who are still stuck in 2008 and only reading the blog to miss out. Abstruse Goose, click for legible original:
Tom Whyntie points out that the rabbit should really be more spherical.
How Scientists See the World Read More »
Even enigmatic eclipsing binaries are thrilled to appear in Beetle Bailey. Sinatra would have killed to appear in Beetle Bailey, am I right?
It’s walking cats that is truly problematic.
Feel free to construct your own similes. (Via Cynical-C.)
Forget About Herding Read More »
Feeling like Valentine’s Day is a little too cutesy for an intellectual heavyweight such as yourself? Nonsense; the heart may have its reasons, but reason can certainly figure them out, given sufficient grant funding and some diligent graduate students. Jennifer Ouellette points to a talk by Mary Roach that is safe for TED but arguably not safe for work, and shares some brain scans to prove that love is really blind.
If all that biology is a bit too squishy, Sarah Kavassalis does the math. Here you will find the right functions to use to draw hearts — my favorite is the fourth heart curve from Wolfram|Alpha, shown at right — and how to construct topologically nontrivial versions out of construction paper and scissors. Who says mathematicians aren’t practical? Nor are they above venturing into the realm of the literary.
Roses are red.
Violets are approximately blue.
A paracompact manifold with a Lorentzian metric,
can be a spacetime, if it has dimension greater than or equal to two.
Shakespeare, maybe not. But the course of true science never did run smooth.
Nothing Says “I Love You” Like a Non-Orientable Surface Read More »
We haven’t forgotten (read — “I presume Daniel hasn’t forgotten”); we owe several very generous donors rewards from our Donors Choose Challenge. But while our appreciation knows no bounds, our imagination in coming up with incentives is somewhat impoverished. At least compared to Chad Orzel, who promised his readers a physics-themed puppet show if they hit a certain donation threshold. Which indeed they did, and the good news is that we all benefit. For your consideration: the Bohr-Einstein Debates, as told by dog puppets.
The Bohr-Einstein Debates, With Puppets from Chad Orzel on Vimeo.
It seems clear that Einstein was wedded to a definition of “reality” that wasn’t flexible enough to cover the implications of quantum mechanics. But it’s even more clear to me now that he bore a spooky resemblance to a Bichon.
Bohr, Einstein, Puppies, Puppets Read More »
I don’t think you can define a consistent arrow of time here, but clearly more investigation is warranted.
The Cyclic Theory of Evolution Read More »
It can’t be easy being the guy who has to introduce Albert Einstein. But it helps if you’re George Bernard Shaw.
You have to love YouTube, although this is only an excerpt from a somewhat longer speech. Most of the text is here.
Makers of Universes Read More »
The latest Twitter phenomenon is FakeAPStylebook, an amusing take on guidelines to proper journalistic writing. Some tips include:
Amusing enough, but I have to admit that I originally read “Fake AP Stylebook” as “Fake APS Stylebook,” as if it were the (fake) American Physical Society rather than the (fake) Associated Press that was handing out advice. After all, the real APS is quite a bit quirkier than the AP; they insist that no article title begin with “The,” and for a while there they were insisting that “Lagrangian” be spelled “Lagrangean.” (Everyone has their quirks; Nature has banned the words “paradigm” and “scenario” from its pages entirely.)
So I’m sure we can do better. Any good suggestions for improved physics style? I promise to tweet anything sufficiently amusing.
Not sure which blogs the editors of the Onion have been reading, but I have to approve of their proposed model for explaining the low entropy at the beginning of a football game by recourse to an infinite series of downs before “first down.”
NEW YORK — Citing the extremely low level of entropy present before a normal set of football downs, scientists from the NFL’s quantum mechanics and cosmology laboratories spoke Monday of a theoretical proto-down before the first. “Ultimately, we believe there are an infinite number of proto-downs played before the first visible snap,” lead NFL scientist Dr. Oliver Claussen said during a press conference, adding that the very last yocto-down is a by-product of leftover fourth downs from this universe, as well as those from a theoretical universe running along an arrow of time concurrent to our own.
Probably some enthusiastic football coach is going to try to cash in by writing a book about the idea, while others fulminate on the sidelines about how such irresponsible speculation is destroying the game. (Thanks to Ahmet Toker and Tom Fishman.)
Explaining the Arrow of Football Read More »