Swans on Tea

Expelled Exposed, because I have been commanded to do so

(I know, I know. The German is wrong. Poetic license. Mordeo me rather than mea culpa)

Analytics according to Captain Kirk

Yellow-shirt crewperson deaths: 6 (10%)
Blue-Shirt crewperson deaths: 5 (8 %)
Engineering smock crewperson deaths: 4
Red-Shirt crewperson deaths: 43 (73%)

Sunday’s Speed Bump cartoon.
The caption is (concerning an alien “dog”) “She’s 3 … or 22 trillion in light-years.”
Light-year, as we all know, is a distance. (As is “parsec.” I’m looking at you, Han Solo!)

This is the kind of spontaneous publicity, your name in print, that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now! Navin R. Johnson
I’ve actually been in print before, with some cartoons published in Physics Today back when they had an art editor with taste who liked my work. [...]

Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers is complaining that all the cartoonists are making fun of him
It’s true.
Before I even knew he existed, I drew a cartoon depicting cephalopod torture. It was a promotion for a talk on superconducting quantum interference devices, or SQUIDs. (I got criticism that it’s more an octopus-looking thing in [...]

Over at the XKCD blag, Randall discusses solar sails and levitating squirrels. And he’s absolutely right — the Back-to-the-Futuresque 1.21 Gigawatts will levitate about a kg, assuming perfect reflection. Assuming absorption, you vaporize the squirrel in a couple of milliseconds.
(1 kg of water requires about 2.5 million Joules to boil away, starting at [...]