Swans on Tea

Today was chosen as Talk Like a Physicist Day because it’s Einstein’s birthday, as well as Pi day in the US date format: 3/14 (Just wait 5 years and it will be precision Pi day: 3/14/15). So here’s some Einstein.
The New Yorker: Time Bandits
What were Einstein and Gödel talking about?
Bonus Einstein: [...]

Cut Pay For Government Workers
I’m going to rail against this, but it’s only partly because I’m a Federal employee. It’s mostly because the authors are being deceitful.
If this were an airline or an automaker, the solution would be a no-brainer: It would be time for a big pay cut. If the company didn’t cut [...]

DNA’s Dirty Little Secret
In Puckett’s case, where there were only five and a half markers available, the San Francisco crime lab put the figure at one in 1.1 million—still remote enough to erase any reasonable doubt of his guilt. The problem is that, according to most scientists, this statistic is only relevant when DNA material [...]

If the Möbius bagel wasn’t enough, here’s an animation of how to cut a toroid into four linked pieces: Tetrabagelectomy
Update: Now there’s the octobagel

Tale of a Would-Be Spy, Buried Treasure, and Uncrackable Code
When officials searched the aspiring spy, they found a paper tucked under the insole of his right shoe. On it were written the addresses of several Iraqi and Chinese embassies in Europe. In a trouser pocket they discovered a spiral pad in which Regan, who had [...]

Physics Buzz: How Much Snow did Washington DC REALLY Get?
Washington DC looks like a 10 x 10 mile square with a bite taken out of it. All together the city is 68.3 square miles. It’s not too hard to figure out the total volume of snow dumped on the city so far.
55.6″ depth of [...]

Kottke three-fer
Insanely deep fractal zoom
The final magnification is e.214. Want some perspective? a magnification of e.12 would increase the size of a particle to the same as the earths orbit! e.21 would make a particle look the same size as the milky way and e.42 would be equal to the universe. This zoom smashes all [...]

Arts: Photographer Loves Math, Graphs Her Images
Graziano, a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. “I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone,” she says. Graziano doesn’t go out looking for a specific function but lets [...]

From Fish to Infinity
I have a friend who gets a tremendous kick out of science, even though he’s an artist. Whenever we get together all he wants to do is chat about the latest thing in evolution or quantum mechanics. But when it comes to math, he feels at sea, and it saddens him. The [...]

PhD comics advice for news media

Give them pizza, apparently. They’ll starve.
The perfect way to slice a pizza
They can’t think about sharing a pizza, for example, without falling headlong into the mathematics of how to slice it up. “We went to lunch together at least once a week,” says Mabry, recalling the early 1990s when they were both at Louisiana [...]

Mathematically Correct Breakfast
It is not hard to cut a bagel into two equal halves which are linked like two links of a chain.
You may be compelled to ask why anyone would figure out how to do such a thing. I understand why, but cannot explain.
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Something to consider: the nutritional content of a cubic [...]