Swans on Tea

He was on the other night, but you can travel through time (or not) and see the video: The Colbert Report and Sean’s post on the experience

NASA’s Prophet Will Give You Nightmares
Professor Hansen has been driven into a strange situation, and produced a strange book. For one-third of a century now, this cantankerous scientist has been more accurate in his predictions about global warming than anyone else alive. He saw these disastrous changes coming long before others did, and the U.S. [...]

An unexpected result of Tiger practicing his putting on someone else’s green.
Tiger Woods drives sales of physics book sky-high
A photograph showing a copy of Get A Grip On Physics by John Gribbin on the floor of Tiger Woods’s wrecked SUV has seen the book rocket up Amazon’s bestseller chart

xkcd: Physics for Entertainment
Physics for Entertainment was written by Yakov Perelman in the 1920’s (in Russian) and updated periodically through the 1930’s. There are actually two parts to it, but Volume 1 is long out-of-print (though findable online — more on that later). The book I have is a 1975 translation of [...]

The New Yorker: HOSED
Elizabeth Kolbert has some not very flattering things to say about Levitt and Dubner’s new book. (along with RealClimate and several other blogs)
According to Levitt and Dubner, the story’s message is a simple one: if, at any particular moment, things look bleak, it’s because people are seeing them the wrong [...]

AT Europe: London Close-up – The Amazing Staircase
Limited by space, we melded the idea of a staircase with our client’s desire for a library to form a ‘library staircase’ in which English oak stair treads and shelves are both completely lined with books. With a skylight above lighting the staircase, it becomes the perfect place [...]

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Persistence, Jury-Rigging, and Ingenuity Against All Odds
A Malawian youth, whose family could not afford his school tuition, learns some physics and builds a windmill to generate electricity for his village.
William scoured trash bins and junkyards for materials he could use to build his windmill. With only a couple of [...]

Bookends for physics geeks
We said that it’s simple, and it is: it’s a brick wrapped in a piece of paper.
If you don’t have a couple of bricks (and we didn’t), they turn out to be cheap at hardware and home improvement stores. These are “cement bricks” — red dyed cement– and cost about $0.25 each. [...]

xkcd: volume 0
The xkcd book is now officially available in the store!

Explained with cartoons. Amusing ourselves to death
Oh, crap.
Related — paraphrase of a quote I heard: For years we’ve been worried about the government spooks (FBI, CIA, NSA et. al) monitoring us against our will. Little did we know that all it would require to blissfully go down that path was to make [...]

(That’s a line from William Steig’s wonderful book, CDB!)
I’ve been busy. I’m off to a family reunion soon and have been getting things prepared for my trip. Since I wanted to have something in the queue for when I am away from the internet, I’ve been hoarding posts. A few are ready [...]

In the recent foray into the physics of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, there was a comment on Chad’s post which mentioned Jasper Fforde’s The Fourth Bear. I had read the first book in the series, so I picked this one up a few weeks ago, and since this is the Jell-0 of [...]