Humor
To-do list for 2010:
- Compute likelihood gravitational quantum tunneling from Earth to Jupiter- Check whether I am safe, or need to gain weight.
Cartoon by xkcd.
Happy new year!
Photo: Bente Lilja ByeChristmas at Fishermans Wharf, San Francisco.
The American Geophysical Union is said to be the world's largest gathering of geoscientists. Remember that planet Earth is exactly that – a planet. So include a number of astronomers and astrophysicists in this herd of nerds, some 16000 of them actually. This gathering is misleadingly called The American Geophysical Union Fall meeting, when in fact it is more like a Christmas meeting as it takes place the week before Christmas every year in San Francisco, one of my favorite cities in the whole wide world.
Topics like natural…
"Physicists who want to protect traditional Christmas realize that the only way to keep from changing Christmas is not to observe it."
Hank |
Tuesday began as a day like any other. Rolled out of bed at 10AM, read some awesome science blogging (here, where else?) over coffee, then went to the office where I was looking forward to a round of golf and a nap before playing some X-box before going home.
I arrived at the office and remembered I hadn't eaten breakfast; golf would have to wait. "Hey Bloggy," I said, "want to go to Mels? It's biscuit and honey day."
No answer. I looked over at where Bloggy would usually be boring into me with his wee beady eyes, making sure work gets done, but it was empty.…
Who is the president of physics? Hawking, maybe?
"I mean, what's more likely -- that I have uncovered fundamental flaws in this field that no one in it has ever thought about, or that I need to read a little more? Hint: it's the one that involves less work."
More at xkcd.
One of the beauties of spiral galaxies is bursts of
blue-and-red hydrogen light from newly-born clusters of stars. In
the 19th century a poetically similar outburst of creativity occurred
in Naples, which not only transformed Italian popular music, but
propelled by recordings of Enrico Caruso and Mario Lanza among others,
has since warmed hearts across the globe.
La Canzone Napoletana is understood to have taken off in 1835 with the song Te voglio bbene assaie
by Raffaele Sacco (1787 –1872), who as well as being a poet was also an
inventor of optical instruments. The particular…
In honor of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species, The Star has decided to trash Darwin.
No, they're not going creationist on us, but Stephen Marche argues that Genesis beats the Origin hands down as literature:
Genesis, it has to be said, is tough to beat as a piece of writing. It contains both the best of the wilderness, emerging over several generations from the greatest poets of the Judean desert, and the best of civilization, being polished by its proximity to the original cities in Iraq and Persia. Darwin did not have such good fortune in his time and place.…
I know Thanksgiving is tomorrow but I'm getting a head start, in anticipation of the food coma I assume I will be in tomorrow. In no particular order, I am thankful for:
1. Jessica Hagy, at Indexed.
2. Humor, especially the ability to laugh at one's self (always a lot of fodder for jokes).
3. Mothers at grocery stores who are willing to offer advice on any cooking question to panicked younger shoppers, including whether the bag full of apples you are holding will indeed fill up the requisite four cups to make Mom's caramel apple pie.
To non coders, a computer program seems almost like a work of magic: somehow, a collection of simple words - like DO WHEN CASE FOR UNTIL CONTINUE - in a computer file can be "run" and will do stuff. It takes an act of imagination in the coder's mind to visualize this weird construct - a program that will do something - and then be able to toss together logic, in the form of a computer language, to transform this mental image into a a living, working, construct that can be simultaneously termed as "built" and "abstract." Its flesh is nothing more than a series of binary 1's and 0's inscribed…