Swans on Tea

This is cool: a micromachined device, which has been cooled into its ground stated.

Scientists supersize quantum mechanics

A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

This, not so much

Quantum mechanics just got REAL

The fuck? In my day, we were taught, with the help of non-graphing calculators and paper notebooks, that quantum mechanics was a lot of wand-wavey nonsense about wave/particle duality that you never had to worry about because it belonged to some magical tiny land that no one visits with their actual eyes. This…this is straight-up magic.

Ohdearohdearohdear. Quantum mechanics is not magic. It’s great that it evokes a sense of wonder when the experimental boundaries are pushed, but considering established science to be “wand-wavey nonsense” diminishes it and makes it easier to accept real nonsense.

The History of the Honey Trap

The trade name for this type of spying is the “honey trap.” And it turns out that both men and women are equally adept at setting one — and equally vulnerable to tumbling in. Spies use sex, intelligence, and the thrill of a secret life as bait. Cleverness, training, character, and patriotism are often no defense against a well-set honey trap. And as in normal life, no planning can take into account that a romance begun in deceit might actually turn into a genuine, passionate affair. In fact, when an East German honey trap was exposed in 1997, one of the women involved refused to believe she had been deceived, even when presented with the evidence. “No, that’s not true,” she insisted. “He really loved me.”

Japan: Nothing says springtime like a penis festival

It may sound like a sophomoric gag. But these are folk rites going back at least 1,500 years, into Japan’s agricultural past. They’re held to ensure a good harvest and promote baby-making.

I don’t know if you’ll get the same flash popup, but mine said “Sponsored by Siemens,” which made me spit Pepsi on my monitor. I now await the spam that the keywords of this post will bring.

In basketball, shooting angle has a big effect on the chances of scoring

It’s the elegant arched trajectory naturally formed by any projectile, from an artillery round to a tomato, moving in a gravitational field. Parabolas have been extensively studied since people started throwing stuff at each other, and they shape the outcome of many ballistic sports, such as baseball, golf, football, shot put and more. But they reach their apex in basketball, where field goals and free throws demand precision control of parabolas.

Over at Cosmic Variance, JoAnne tells a story about dialing Pi on the phone:

Several years ago, before pi-day was famous, a student called the phone number associated with the digits in pi that appear after the decimal point, i.e., 1-415-926-5358. Apparently this is rather common now, and in fact, appears to be promoted as a mnemonic for the first 10 decimal places for those folks we need to have those numbers handy at all times. But this story happened in earlier times, back before the Bay Area split into several area codes. And, as the clever reader has already guessed, that student reached the SLAC main gate. How cool to phone pi and reach the main gate of a major national scientific research laboratory!

I remember the Cesium atomic clock frequency as a phone number: 919-263-1770. It should be a number in the Raleigh, NC region, but there is no listing for it. I’ve never actually called it.

Odds Are, it’s Wrong

They seem to be looking specifically at medical (and related) research; I don’t know if there is a greater prevalence of an underlying problem — not publishing null results — in those fields as compared to elsewhere.

Over the years, hundreds of published papers have warned that science’s love affair with statistics has spawned countless illegitimate findings. In fact, if you believe what you read in the scientific literature, you shouldn’t believe what you read in the scientific literature.

“There is increasing concern,” declared epidemiologist John Ioannidis in a highly cited 2005 paper in PLoS Medicine, “that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.”

3 Minute Brownie. Well, 4 or 5 minutes with the mixing and all.

I can neither confirm nor deny the veracity of this recipe.

NFL to examine 2 possessions in playoffs OT

NFL owners will vote next week whether to allow each team a possession in overtime in the playoffs if the team winning the OT coin toss kicks a field goal on the first series.

This seems a little odd. I wonder if the purpose is to entice teams to go for the TD which would end the game, rather than settle for the field goal. But I looked at my fantasy league statistics from this past year (the NFL site didn’t have league-wide stats) and there were about 800 field goals vs 1200 offensive TDs, so scoring a TD is more likely.

Paris in 26 Gigapixels

Been there, seen almost none of it. I was jet-lagged and alone and only saw what I could see from the cab going from the airport to Gare de Lyon.

Where they died*, hard.

Just in case you need the information.

*Theo didn’t actually die, but who cares.

The Onion: Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text

I didn’t read the whole thing, but since it’s The Onion, I assume it’s funny.

What happens when a balloon explodes?

At 2700 fps.