Category Archives: Cartoon

Treekiller!

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How did I miss this? XKCD is coming out (no, not like that) — as a real book. Oh, the humanity! Trees! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! Oh, gawd, they can’t!

NY Times: When Pixels Find New Life on Real Paper

“It’s not supposed to be a punch line, but hopefully if you didn’t laugh, you’ll laugh at this,” he said. The title text will appear where the tiny copyright notice would appear on a traditional strip.

Does that mean that the book won’t carry a traditional copyright and instead take its lead from the online comic strip itself, which Mr. Munroe licenses under Creative Commons, allowing noncommercial re-use as long as credit is given?

“To anyone who wants to photocopy, bind, and give a copy of the book to their loved one — more power to them,” he said. “He/She will likely be disappointed that you’re so cheap, though.”

Randall notes on his blag

Note: Some of the stuff in the article is no longer accurate – since then, I’ve gone back and redone the layout and comic selection myself.

Cuuuut!

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“Filming in the lab” is the recent theme at PhD comics, and this one grabs the essence. (Or you can start at the beginning, if you’re one of the type that needs to do that.)

I’ve been filmed in the lab and interviewed on TV once, and I’ve observed my colleagues being filmed and interviewed. There’s a pattern to it. They sit you down in front of one of your impressive-looking pieces of lab apparatus and ask questions for a while. For every 15 minutes of interview, approximately 5 seconds will make it to air time in the final story (my data point, at least). Next, they will want some “action” shots of you, which for an atomic physics/optics lab usually means adjusting some mirrors or twiddling a knob on a piece of electronics and looking at an oscilloscope with a serious expression on your face. If there are two of you in the shot, one of you will need to be pointing at the oscilloscope, as if to say, “Here is where the WOW signal would be, if we had a signal. But we don’t, because we can’t run our experiment with these floodlights on.” Obviously “action shot” here does not the mean same thing as in an episode of some detective series — this is no Magnum, Principle Investigator. A third component that is sometimes used is of one of the interviewee walking down a corridor or sidewalk, so that the reporter can do a voice-over. Alternately they will just get shots of the equipment, especially if it whirs and moves about, for that segment.

Then they mash it all together and if you’re lucky they won’t have gotten the science horribly wrong.

Oh, Sure. Take All of the Fun Out of It.

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A Unified Quantum Theory of the Sexual Interaction

In the simplest theories of the sexual interaction, the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian describing all allowed forms of two-body coupling are identified with the conventional gender states, “Male” and “Female” denoted |M> and |F> in the Dirac bra-ket notation; note that the bra is superfluous in this context so, as usual, we dispense with it at the outset. Interactions between |M> and |F> states are assumed to be attractive while those between |M> and |M> or |F> and |F> are supposed either to be repulsive or, in some theories, entirely forbidden.

The treatment, however, is incomplete. There is no mention of the difficulty of describing an interaction in the dressed-state picture. Nor any analysis showing that M-F coupling with aligned spins may, with some probability, be equivalent to applying the creation operator (clearly, these are bosons), while in interactions with spins anti-aligned, this does not happen; both interactions usually occur with both particles in an excited state.

wavefunction