Swans on Tea

The Science of a Really Bad Day
Interview with Peter J. Bentley, PhD, the author of The Science of Why Sh*t Happens

Lots of great stuff on kottke recently
Dan Baum: The Following Account of My Short Career at The New Yorker Ran as a Series of Tweets on May 8, 11, and 12, 2009
Three tweets: (Thufferin’ Thuccotath!)
of arms. Tom Wolfe is right, I think, when admonishes young writers to ignore the old advice about “writing [...]

Physicists can geek anything up. Analyzing the sizes of the cats in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back
The Cat in the Hat comes back and gets small
Ok, so Cat A is a little different (I will assume that is close before – or close enough). Cat B, however, doesn’t fit the pattern I [...]

Green Eggs and Toast
Changing standard storytelling as an exercise in challenging kids. Plus, it’s fun. I’ve done these and similar things with my nieces. The fill-in-the-last-word is something I learned from someone with a background in child development, and the replace-a-word I do just because I love kids’ sense of the absurd [...]

Spaghetti Book Club
Reviews by kids for kids
40 reviews of Charlotte’s Web. No Kafka, though. Strange omission, that.
via

An infographic retelling of Little Red Riding Hood
Slagsmålsklubben

Guilty Secrets Survey results revealed!
George Orwell’s 1984 tops the list of books that people pretend they have read, in a survey carried out for World Book Day 2009 to uncover the nation’s guilty reading secrets. Of the 65% who claimed to have read a book which in truth they haven’t 42% admit to having said [...]

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Coming This Christmas
Release date is December 22 and is available for pre-ordering at Amazon
Anyone who follows Uncertain Principles knows how well Chad writes and has seen some excerpts already.

Walden, and 99 other Free Online Books Every Student of Humanity Should Read
The beauty of the public domain is that after an author’s death, his or her works eventually become freely available to the public. This allows websites like Project Guttenberg to index countless classic texts for people to read online or download.
This is an [...]

Stephanie reviews Who’s afraid of Marie Curie? by Linley Erin Hall.
Many interesting topics are highlighted, including
There is also a very good summary chapter on the research on gender differences in scientific ability. As you might have guessed, males and females are more similar than they are different on most (but not all) aspects of [...]

A book review of Trick or Treatment
While no reasonable person can believe in Stairways subliminal lyrics, far too many people do believe in equally implausible things in the realm of alternative medicine. In the book, the authors tackle four main areas: acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic and herbal medicine. The books conclusion is that acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic [...]

Here Comes Everybody Review at Bruce Schneier’s blog.
Economists have long understood the corollary concept of Coase’s ceiling, a point above which organizations collapse under their own weight — where hiring someone, however competent, means more work for everyone else than the new hire contributes. Software projects often bump their heads against Coase’s ceiling: recall Frederick [...]